IMa»MMMMMM«^^M 


iSMi^ 


TTt 


L  '^  Jb   JjL  J&  Am^'iA  1     1/  « 


t 


1^1^ . 


Digitized  by  tine  Internet  Arciiive 

in  2007  witii  funding  from 

IVIicrosoft  Corporation 


littp://www.arcli  ive.org/details/cliarlesdarwinOOalleiala 


Edited  by  ANDREW  LANG 


^CHARLES    DARWIN^ 


"4- 

GEANT    ALLEN 


NEW  YOEK: 
D.    APPLETON   AND    COMPANY, 

1,  8,  ASD  6  BOND  STREET. 
1885. 


1  ??^ 


PEEFACB 


In  this  little  volume  I  have  endeavoured  to  present  tho 
life  and  work  of  Charles  Darwin  viewed  as  a  moment 
in  a  great  revolution,  in  due  relation  both  to  those  who 
went  before  and  to  those  who  come  after  him.  Recog- 
nising, as  has  been  well  said,  that  the  wave  makes 
the  crest,  not  the  crest  the  wave,  I  have  tried  to  let  my 
hero  fall  naturally  into  his  proper  place  in  a  vast  onward 
movement  of  the  human  intellect,  of  which  he  was 
himself  at  once  a  splendid  product  and  a  moving  cause 
of  the  first  importance.  I  have  attempted  to  show  him 
both  as  receiving  the  torch  from  Lamarck  and  Malthus, 
and  as  passing  it  on  with  renewed  brilliancy  to  the  wide 
school  of  evolutionary  thinkers  whom  his  work  was 
instrumental  in  arousing  to  fresh  and  vigorous  activity 
along  a  thousand  separate  and  varied  lines  of  thought 
and  action. 

As  Mr.  Francis  Darwin  was  already  engaged  upon  a 
life  of  his  father,  I  should  have  shrunk  from  putting 


iv  Preface 

forth  my  own  little  book  if  I  had  not  succeeded  in 
securing  beforehand  his  kind  sanction.  That  sanction, 
however,  was  at  once  so  frankly  and  cordially  given,  that 
all  my  hesitation  upon  such  a  score  was  immediately 
laid  aside ;  and  as  I  have  necessarily  had  to  deal  rather 
with  Darwin's  position  as  a  thinker  and  worker  than 
with  the  biographical  details  of  his  private  life,  I  trust 
the  lesser  book  may  not  clash  with  the  greater,  but  to 
some  extent  may  supplement  and  even  illustrate  it. 

Treating  my  subject  mainly  as  a  study  in  the  inter- 
action of  organism  and  environment,  it  has  been  neces- 
sary for  me  frequently  to  introduce  the  names  of  living 
men  of  science  side  by  side  with  some  of  those  who 
have  more  or  less  recently  passed  away  from  among  us. 
For  uniformity's  sake,  as  well  as  for  brevity's,  I  have 
been  compelled,  in  every  instance  alike,  to  omit  the 
customary  conventional  handles.  I  trust  those  who  thus 
find  themselves  docked  of  their  usual  titles  of  respect 
will  kindly  remember  that  the  practice  is  in  fact  adopted 
honoris  causa  ;  they  are  paying  prematurely  the  usual 
penalty  of  intellectual  greatness. 

My  obligations  to  Professor  Huxley,  to  Professor 
Fiske,  to  Mr.  Herbert  Spencer,  to  Professor  Sachs,  to 
Hermann  Miiller,  to  Dr.  Krause,  to  Charles  Darwin  him- 
self, and  to  many  other  historians  and  critics  of  evolu- 
tionism, will  be  sufficiently  obvious  to  all   instructed 


Preface  v 

readers,  and  are  for  tlie  most  part  fully  acknowledged 
already  in  tlie  text.  It  would  be  absurd  to  overload  so 
small  and  popularly  written  a  book  with  references  and 
authorities.  I  hope,  therefore,  that  any  other  writers  to 
whom  I  may  inadvertently  have  neglected  to  confess  my 
debts  will  kindly  rest  satisfied  with  this  general  acknow- 
ledgment. There  are,  however,  three  persons  in  par- 
ticular from  whom  I  have  so  largely  borrowed  facts  or 
ideas  that  I  owe  them  more  special  and  definite  thanks. 
From  Mr.  Woodall's  admirable  paper  on  Charles  Dar- 
win, contributed  to  the  '  Transactions  of  the  Shropshire 
Archasological  Society,'  I  have  taken  much  interesting 
information  about  my  hero's  immediate  ancestry  and 
early  days.  From  Mr.  Samuel  Butler,  the  author  of 
*  Evolution  Old  and  New,'  I  have  derived  many  preg- 
nant suggestions  with  regard  to  the  true  position  and 
meaning  of  Bufibn,  Erasmus  Darwin,  and  the  early 
essentially  teleological  evolutionists — suggestions  which 
I  am  all  the  more  anxious  to  acknowledge  since  I  differ 
fundamentally  from  Mr.  Butler  in  his  estimate  of  the 
worth  of  Charles  Darwin's  distinctive  discovery  of 
natural  selection.  Finally,  to  Mr.  Bates,  the  '  Naturalist 
on  the  Amazons,'  I  am  indebted  for  several  valuable 
items  of  information  as  to  the  general  workings  of  the 
pre-Darwinian  evolutionary  spirit. 

In  a  book  dealing  so  largely  with  a  contemporary 


vi  Preface 

movement,  the  history  of  which  has  never  yet  been  con- 
secutively written  down  in  full,  or  subjected  as  a  whole 
to  searching  criticism,  there  must  probably  be  many 
errors  of  detail,  which  can  hardly  be  avoided  under  such 
circumstances.  I  have  endeavoured  to  minimise  them 
as  far  as  possible.  For  those  which  may  have  escaped 
my  own  scrutiny  I  must  trust  both  for  correction  and 
for  indulgence  to  the  kindness  of  my  readers. 


CONTENTS 


CHAPTER 


FAGB 


I.  THE  WORLD   INTO  WHICH  DARWIN  WAS   BORN    .           .  • 

II.  CHARLES   DARWIN  AND   HIS  ANTECEDENTS      ...  20 

III.      EARLY  DAYS 31 

IV.      DARWIN'S   WANDER-YEARS 38 

V.      THE   PERIOD    OF   INCUBATION 88 

VI.      THE   ORIGIN   OF   SPECIES 79 

VII.  THE   DARWINIAN   REVOLUTION   BEGINS          .           .          .  us 

VIII.      THE   DESCENT    OF   MAN I33 

IX.      THE   THEORY   OF  COURTSHIP I44 

X.      VICTORY  AND   REST 155 

XI.  DARWIN'S   PLACE  IN  THE  EVOLUTIONARY  MOVEMENT  177 

XII.  THE   NET   RESULT       .......  192 

INDEX .           ...  203 


CHAELES   DAE  WIN. 

CHAPTER  I. 

THE  WORLD   INTO   WHICH   DARWIN  WAS  BORN. 

Charles  Darwin  was  a  great  man,  and  he  accomplished 
a  great  work.  The  Newton  of  biology,  he  found  the 
science  of  life  a  chaotic  maze;  he  left  it  an  orderly 
system,  with  a  definite  plan  and  a  recognisable  meaning. 
Great  men  are  not  accidents;  great  works  are  not 
accomplished  in  a  single  day.  Both  are  the  product 
of  adequate  causes.  The  great  man  springs  from  an 
ancestry  competent  to  produce  him ;  he  is  the  final 
flower  and  ultimate  outcome  of  converging  hereditary 
forces,  that  culminate  at  last  in  the  full  production  of 
his  splendid  and  exceptional  personality.  The  great 
work  which  it  is  his  mission  to  perform  in  the  world  is 
never  wholly  of  his  own  inception.  It  also  is  the  last 
effect  of  antecedent  conditions,  the  slow  result  of  ten- 
dencies and  ideas  long  working  unseen  or  but  little 
noticed  beneath  the  surface  of  opinion,  yet  all  gradually 
conspiring  together  towards  the  definitive  revolution  at 
whose  head,  in  the  fulness  of  time,  the  as  yet  unborn 
genius  is  destined  to  place  himself.     This  is  especially 


2  Charles  Darwin 

the  case  with  those  extraordinary  waves  of  mental 
upheaval,  one  of  which  gave  us  the  Italian  renaissance, 
and  another  of  which  is  actually  in  progress  around  us 
at  the  present  day.  They  have  their  sources  deep 
down  in  the  past  of  human  thought  and  human  feeling, 
and  they  are  themselves  but  the  final  manifestation  of 
innumerable  energies  which  have  long  been  silently  agi- 
tating the  souls  of  nations  in  their  profoundest  depths. 
Thus,  every  great  man  may  be  regarded  as  possess- 
ing two  distinct  lines  of  ancestry,  physical  and  spiritual, 
each  of  which  separately  demands  elucidation.  He 
owes  much  in  one  way  to  his  father  and  his  mother, 
his  grandfathers  and  his  grandmothers,  and  his  remoter 
progenitors,  from  some  or  all  of  whom  he  derives,  in 
varying  degrees  and  combinations,  the  personal  qualities 
whose  special  interaction  constitutes  his  greatness  and 
his  idiosyncrasy ;  he  owes  much  in  another  way  to  his 
intellectual  and  moral  ancestors,  the  thinkers  and 
workers  who  have  preceded  him  in  his  own  department 
of  thought  or  action,  and  have  made  possible  in  the 
course  of  ages  the  final  development  of  his  special  revo- 
lution or  his  particular  system.  Viewed  as  an  indivi- 
dual, he  is  what  he  is,  with  all  his  powers  and  faculties 
and  potentialities,  in  virtue  of  the  brain,  the  frame,  the 
temperament,  the  energy  he  inherits  directly  from  his 
actual  ancestors,  paternal  and  maternal ;  viewed  as  a 
factor  or  element  in  a  great  movement,  he  is  what  he 
is  because  the  movement  had  succeeded  in  reachinor 
such  and  such  a  point  in  its  progress  already  without 
him,  and  waited  only  for  such  and  such  a  grand  and 
commanding  personality  in  order  to  carry  it  yet  a  step 
further  on  its  course  of  development. 


The  World  into  which  Darwin  was  Born     3 

No  man  who  ever  lived  would  more  cordially 
have  recognised  these  two  alternative  aspects  of  the 
great  worker's  predetermining  causes  than  Charles 
Darwin.  He  knew  well  that  the  individual  is  the 
direct  cumulative  product  of  his  physical  predecessors, 
and  that  he  works  and  is  worked  upon  in  innumerable 
ways  by  the  particular  environment  into  whose  midst 
he  is  born.  Let  us  see,  then,  in  his  own  case  what 
were  these  two  main  sets  of  conditioning  circumstances 
which  finally  led  up  to  the  joint  production  of  Charles 
Darwin,  the  man  and  the  philosopher,  the  thinking 
brain  and  the  moving  energy.  In  other  words,  what 
was  the  state  of  the  science  of  life  at  the  time  when  he 
first  began  to  observe  and  to  speculate ;  and  what  was 
the  ancestry  which  made  him  be  born  a  person  capable 
of  helping  it  forward  at  a  single  bound  over  its  great 
restricting  dogmatic  barrier  of  the  fixity  of  species  ? 

Let  us  begin,  in  the  first  place,  by  clearing  the 
path  beforehand  of  a  popular  misconception,  so  extremely 
general  and  almost  universal  that,  unless  it  be  got  rid 
of  at  the  very  outset  of  our  sketch,  much  of  the  real 
scope  and  purport  of  Darwin's  life  and  work  must,  of 
necessity,  remain  entirely  misunderstood  by  the  vast 
mass  of  English  readers.  In  the  public  mind  Darwin 
is,  perhaps,  most  commonly  regarded  as  the  discoverer 
and  founder  of  the  evolution  hypothesis.  Two  ideas 
are  usually  associated  with  his  name  and  memory.  It 
is  believed  that  he  was  the  first  propounder  of  the 
theory  which  supposes  aU  plant  and  animal  forms 
to  be  the  result,  not  of  special  creation,  but  of  slow 
modification  in  pre-existent  organisms.  It  is  further 
and   more   particularly  believed  that  he  was  the  first 


4  Charles  Darwin 

proponnder  of  the  theory  which  supposes  the  descent  of 
man  to  be  traceable  from  a  remote  and  more  or  less 
monkey-like  ancestor.  Now,  as  a  matter  of  fact,  Darwin 
was  not  the  prime  originator  of  either  of  these  two 
great  cardinal  ideas.  Though  he  held  both  as  part  of 
his  organised  theory  of  things,  he  was  not  by  any 
means  the  first  or  the  earliest  thinker  to  hold  them  or 
to  propound  them  publicly.  Though  he  gained  for 
them  both  a  far  wider  and  more  general  acceptance 
than  they  had  ever  before  popularly  received,  he  laid 
no  sort  of  claim  himself  to  originality  or  proprietorship 
in  either  theory.  The  grand  idea  which  he  did  really 
originate  was  not  the  idea  of '  descent  with  modifica- 
tion,' but  the  idea  of  'natural  selection,'  by  which 
agency,  as  he  was  the  first  to  prove,  definite  kinds  of 
plants  and  animals  have  been  slowly  evolved  from 
simpler  forms,  with  definite  adaptations  to  the  special 
circumstances  by  which  they  are  surrounded.  In  a 
word,  it  was  the  peculiar  glory  of  Charles  Darwin,  not 
to  have  suggested  that  all  the  variety  of  animal  and 
vegetable  life  might  have  been  produced  by  slow  modi- 
fications in  one  or  more  original  types,  but  to  have 
shown  the  nature  of  the  machinery  by  which  such  a 
result  could  be  actually  attained  in  the  practical  working 
out  of  natural  causes.  He  did  not  invent  the  develop- 
ment theory,  but  he  made  it  believable  and  comprehen- 
sible. He  was  not,  as  most  people  falsely  imagine,  the 
Moses  of  evolutionism,  the  prime  mover  in  the  biological 
revolution;  he  was  the  Joshua  who  led  the  world  of 
thinkers  and  workers  into  full  fruition  of  that  promised 
land  which  earlier  investigators  had  but  dimly  descried 
from  the  Pisgah-top  of  conjectural  speculation. 


The  World  into  which  Darwin  was  Born     5 

How  far  Darwin's  special  idea  of  natural  selection 
supplemented  and  rendered  credible  the  earlier  idea  of 
descent  with  modification  we  shall  see  more  fully  when 
we  come  to  treat  of  the  inception  and  growth  of  his 
great  epoch-making  work,  '  The  Origin  of  Species ; ' 
for  the  present,  it  must  suffice  to  point  out  that  in  the 
world  into  which  he  was  born,  the  theory  of  evolution 
already  existed  in  a  more  or  less  shadowy  and  un- 
developed shape.  And  since  it  was  his  task  in  life  to 
raise  this  theory  from  the  rank  of  a  mere  plausible  and 
happy  guess  to  the  rank  of  a  highly  elaborate  and 
almost  universally  accepted  biological  system,  we  may 
pause  awhile  to  consider  on  the  threshold  what  was  the 
actual  state  of  natural  science  at  the  moment  when  the 
great  directing  and  organising  intelligence  of  Charles 
Darwin  first  appeared. 

From  time  immemorial,  in  modern  Christendom  at 
leaKt,  it  had  been  the  general  opinion  of  learned  and 
simple  alike  that  every  species  of  plant  or  animal  owed 
its  present  form  and  its  original  existence  to  a  distinct 
act  of  special  creation.  This  naif  belief,  unsupported 
as  it  was  by  any  sort  of  internal  evidence,  was  supposed 
to  rest  directly  upon  the  express  authority  of  a  few 
obscure  statements  in  the  Book  of  Genesis.  The  Creator, 
it  was  held,  had  in  the  beginning  formed  each  kind 
after  a  particular  pattern,  had  endowed  it  with  special 
organs  devised  with  supreme  wisdom  for  subserving 
special  functions,  and  had  bestowed  upon  it  the  mystical 
power  of  reproducing  its  like  in  its  own  image  to  all 
generations.  No  variation  of  importance  ever  occurred 
within  the  types  thus  constituted;  all  plants  and  animals 
always  retained  their  special  forms  unaltered  in  any 
2 


6  Charles  Darwin 

way  from  era  to  era.  This  is  tlie  doctrine  of  the  fixity 
and  immutability  of  species,  almost  universal  in  the 
civilised  world  up  to  the  end  of  the  last  century. 

Improbable  as  such  a  crude  idea  now  seems  to  any 
person  even  moderately  acquainted  with  the  extra- 
ordinary variety  and  variability  of  living  forms,  it 
nevertheless  contained  nothing  at  all  likely  to  con- 
tradict the  ordinary  experience  of  the  everyday  observer 
in  the  last  century.  The  handful  of  plants  and  animals 
with  which  he  was  personally  acquainted  consisted  for 
the  most  part  of  a  few  large,  highly  advanced,  and 
well-marked  forms,  not  in  the  least  liable  to  be  mistaken 
for  one  another  even  by  the  most  hasty  and  casual 
spectator.  A  horse  can  immediately  be  discriminated 
by  the  naked  eye  from  a  donkey,  and  a  cow  from  a 
sheep,  without  risk  of  error;  nobody  is  likely  to  confuse 
wheat  with  barley,  or  to  hesitate  between  classing  any 
given  fruit  that  is  laid  before  him  as  a  pear  or  an  apple, 
a  plum  or  a  nectarine.  Variability  seldom  comes  under 
the  notice  of  the  ordinary  passing-  spectator  as  it  does 
under  that  of  the  prying  and  curious  scientific  observer ; 
and  when  it  comes  at  all,  as  in  the  case  of  dogs  and 
pigeons,  roses  and  hyacinths,  it  is  no  doubt  set  down 
carelessly  on  a  superficial  view  as  a  mere  result  of 
human  selection  or  of  deliberate  mongrel  interbreed- 
ing. To  the  eye  of  the  average  man,  all  the  living 
objects  ordinarily  perceived  in  external  nature  fall  at 
once  under  certain  fixed  and  recognisable  kinds,  as 
dogs  and  horses,  elms  and  ashes,  whose  limits  he  is 
never  at  all  inclined  to  confound  in  any  way  one  with 
the  other. 

Linnaeus,    the    great   father   of    modem   scientific 


The  World  into  which  Darwin  was  Born     7 

biology,  had  frankly  and  perhaps  unthinkingly  accepted 
this  current  and  almost  universal  dogma  of  the  fixity  and 
immutability  of  species.  Indeed,  by  defining  a  kind  as 
a  group  of  plants  or  animals  so  closely  resembling  one 
another  as  to  give  rise  to  the  belief  that  they  might  all 
be  descended  from  a  single  ancestor  or  pair  of  ancestors, 
he  implicitly  gave  the  new  sanction  of  his  weighty 
authority  to  the  creation  hypothesis,  and  to  the  pre- 
valent doctrine  of  the  unchangeability  of  organic  forms. 
To  Linnaeus,  the  species  into  which  he  mapped  out  all 
the  plants  and  animals  then  known,  appeared  as  the 
descendants  each  of  a  solitary  progenitor  or  of  a 
primitive  couple,  called  into  existence  at  the  beginning 
of  all  things  by  the  direct  fiat  of  a  designing  Creator. 
He  saw  the  world  of  organic  life  as  composed  of  so 
many  well-demarcated  types,  each  separate,  distinct, 
and  immutable,  each  capable  of  producing  its  like  ad, 
infinitum,  and  each  unable  to  vary  from  its  central 
standard  in  any  of  its  individuals,  except  perhaps 
within  very  narrow  and  unimportant  limits. 

But  towards  the  close  of  the  eighteenth  century, 
side  by  side  with  the  general  awakening  of  the  human 
intellect  and  the  arrival  of  a  new  ,  era  of  free 
social  investigation,  which  culminated  in  a  fresh  order 
of  things,  there  was  developed  a  more  critical  and 
sceptical  attitude  in  the  world  of  science,  which  soon 
produced  a  notable  change  of  front  among  thinking 
naturalists  as  to  the  origin  and  meaning  of  specific 
distinctions. 

Bufibn  was  the  first  great  biological  innovator  who 
ventured,  in  very  doubtful  and  tentative  language,  to 
suggest  the  possibility  of  the  rise  of  species  from  one 


8  Charles  Darwin 

another  bj  slow  modification  of  ancestral  forms.  Essen- 
tially a  popular  essayist,  writing  in  the  volcanic  priest- 
suppressed  France  of  the  ancien  regime,  during  the 
inconsistent  days  of  Louis  XV.  and  Louis  XVL,  when 
it  was  uncertain  whether  novel  and  heterodox  opinions 
would  bring  down  upon  their  author  fame  and  reputa- 
tion or  the  Sorbonne  and  the  Bastille,  Buffon  was 
careful  to  put  his  conjectural  conclusions  in  a  studiously 
guarded  and  often  even  ironical  form.  But  time  after 
time,  in  his  great  discursive  work,  the  '  Histoire  Natu- 
relle'  (published  in  successive  volumes  between  1749 
and  1788),  he  recurs  anew  to  the  pregnant  suggestion 
that  plants  and  animals  may  not  be  bound  by  fixed  and 
immovable  limits  of  species,  but  may  freely  vary  in 
every  direction  from  a  common  centre,  so  that  one  kind 
may  gradually  and  slowly  be  evolved  by  natural  causes 
from  the  type  of  another.  He  points  out  that,  under- 
lying all  external  diversities  of  character  and  shape, 
fundamental  likenesses  of  type  occur  in  many  animals, 
which  irresistibly  suggest  the  novel  notion  of  common 
descent  from  a  single  ancestor.  Thus  regarded,  he 
says,  not  only  the  ass  and  the  horse  (to  take  a  parti- 
cular passage)  but  even  man  himself,  the  monkeys,  the 
quadrupeds,  and  all  vertebrate  animals,  might  be  viewed 
as  merely  forming  divergent  branches  of  one  and  the 
same  great  family  tree.  Every  such  family,  he  believed, 
whether  animal  or  vegetable,  might  have  sprung  ori 
ginally  from  a  single  stock,  which  after  many  gener- 
ations had  here  developed  into  a  higher  form,  and 
there  degenerated  into  a  lower  and  less  perfect  t}^e 
of  organisation.  Granting  this — granting  that  nature 
could  by  slow  variation  produce  one  species  in  the 


The  World  into  which  Darwin  was  Born     g 

course  of  direct  descent  from  another  unlike  it  (for 
example,  the  ass  from  the  horse),  then,  Buffon  observed, 
there  was  no  further  limit  to  be  set  to  her  powers  in 
this  respect,  and  we  might  reasonably  conclude  that 
from  a  single  primordial  being  she  has  gradually  been 
able  in  the  course  of  time  to  develop  the  whole  con- 
tinuous gamut  of  existing  animal  and  vegetable  life. 
To  be  sure,  Buffon  always  saves  himself  from  censure 
by  an  obvious  afterthought — '  But  no ;  it  is  certain 
from  revelation  that  every  species  was  directly  created 
by  a  separate  fiat.'  This  half-hearted  and  somewhat 
subrisive  denial,  however,  must  be  taken  merely  as  a 
concession  to  the  Sor bonne  and  to  the  fashionable 
exegesis  of  his  own  day ;  and,  even  so,  the  Sorbonne 
was  too  much  in  the  end  for  the  philosophic  thinker. 
He  had  once  in  his  life  at  least  to  make  his  submission 
and  demand  pardon  from  the  oflfended  orthodoxy  of  the 
Paris  faculty. 

The  wave  of  thought  and  feeling,  thus  apologetically 
and  tentatively  stirred  on  the  unrufiled  pond  of 
eighteenth  century  opinion  by  the  startling  plop  of 
Bufibn's  little  smooth-cut  pebble,  soon  widened  out 
on  every  side  in  concentric  circles,  and  affected  with  its 
wash  the  entire  world  of  biological  science  in  every 
country.  Before  the  close  of  the  eighteenth  century 
speculation  as  to  the  origin  of  species  was  rife  in 
all  quarters  of  Europe.  In  France  itself,  Geoffroy 
St.  Hilaire,  constitutionally  cautious  and  undecided, 
but  wide  of  view  and  free  from  prejudice,  came  slowly 
to  the  conclusion,  in  1795,  that  all  species  are  really 
derived  by  modification  from  one  or  more  primitive 
types.     In  Germany,  in  the  very  same  year,  Goethe, 


lo  Charles  Darwin 

with  the  keen  vision  of  the  poet  and  the  calm  eye  of 
the  philosopher  uniquely  combined,  discerned  indepen- 
dently as  by  a  lightning  flash  the  identical  idea  of  the 
origin  of  kinds  by  modification  of  pre-existent  organisms. 
*We  may  assert  without  hesitation,'  says  that  great 
nebulous  thinker  and  observer,  '  that  all  the  more 
perfect  organic  natures,  such  as  fishes,  amphibians, 
birds  and  mammals,  with  man  at  their  head,  were  formed 
at  first  on  one  original  type,  which  still  daily  changes 
and  modifies  its  form  by  propagation.'  In  England, 
twelve  months  earlier,  Dr.  Erasmus  Darwin,  Charles 
Darwin's  grandfather  (of  whom  more  anon),  published 
his  '  Zoonomia,'  a  treatise  on  the  laws  of  animal  life,  in 
which  he  not  only  adopted  Bufibn's  theory  of  the 
origin  of  species  by  evolution,  but  also  laid  down  as 
the  chief  cause  of  such  development  the  actions  and 
needs  of  the  animals  themselves.  According  to  Dr. 
Erasmus  Darwin,  animals  came  to  vary  from  one 
another  chiefly  because  they  were  always  altering  their 
habits  and  voluntarily  accommodating  themselves  to  new 
actions  and  positions  in  life.  His  work  produced  com- 
paratively little  effect  upon  the  world  at  large  in  his 
own  time,  but  it  had  immense  influence  upon  the  next 
great  prophet  of  evolution,  Lamarck,  and  through 
Lamarck  on  Lyell,  Charles  Darwin,  Herbert  Spencer, 
and  the  modern  school  of  evolutionists  generally.  We 
shall  consider  his  views  in  greater  detail  when  we  pass 
froin  the  spiritual  to  the  physical  antecedents  of  Charles 
Darwin. 

It  was  in  1801  that  Lamarck  first  gave  to  the  world 
his  epoch-making  speculations  and  suggestions  on  the 
origin  of  species ;  and  from  that  date  to  the  day  of  his 


The  World  into  which  Darwin  was  Born   ii 

death,  in  1831,  the  unwearied  old  philosopher  continued 
to  devote  his  whole  time  and  energy,  in  blindness  and 
poverty,  to  the  elucidation  of  this  interesting  and  im- 
portant subject,  A  bold,  acute,  and  vigorous  thinker, 
trained  in  the  great  school  of  Diderot  and  D'Alembert, 
with  something  of  the  vivid  Celtic  poetic  imagination, 
and  a  fearless  habit  of  forming  his  own  conclusions 
irrespective  of  common  or  preconceived  ideas,  Lamarck 
went  to  the  very  root  of  the  matter  in  the  most  deter- 
mined fashion,  and  openly  proclaimed  in  the  face  of 
frowning  officialism  under  the  Napoleonic  reaction  his 
profound  conviction  that  all  species,  including  man, 
were  descended  by  modification  from  one  or  more 
primordial  forms.  In  Charles  Darwin's  own  words, 
*  He  first  did  the  eminent  service  of  arousing  attention 
to  the  probability  of  all  change,  in  the  organic  as  well 
as  in  the  inorganic  world,  being  the  result  of  law  and 
not  of  miraculous  interposition.  Lamarck  seems  to 
have  been  chiefly  led  to  his  conclusion  on  the  gradual 
change  of  species  by  the  difficulty  of  distinguishing 
species  and  varieties,  by  the  almost  perfect  gradation  of 
forms  in  certain  groups,  and  by  the  analogy  of  domestic 
productions.  With  respect  to  the  means  of  modifica- 
tion, he  attributed  something  to  the  direct  action  of 
the  physical  conditions  of  life,  something  to  the  crossing 
of  already  existing  forms,  and  much  to  use  and  disuse, 
that  is,  to  the  effects  of  habit.  To  this  latter  agency 
he  seems  to  attribute  all  the  beautiful  adaptations  in 
nature — such  as  the  long  neck  of  the  girafle  for  browsing 
on  the  branches  of  trees.'  He  believed,  in  short,  that 
animals  had  largely  developed  themselves,  by  functional 
efibrt  followed  by  increased  powers  and  abilities. 


12  Charles  Darwin 

Lamarck's  great  work,  tke  '  Pliilosophle  Zoologique,* 
though  opposed  by  the  austere  and  formal  genius  of  the 
immortal  Cuvier — a  reactionary  biological  conservative 
and  obscurantist,  equal  to  the  enormous  task  of  map- 
ping out  piecemeal  with  infinite  skill  and  power  the 
separate  provinces  of  his  chosen  science,  but  incapable 
of  taking  in  all  the  bearings  of  the  whole  field  at  a 
single  vivid  and  comprehensive  sweep — Lamarck's  great 
work  produced  a  deep  and  lasting  impression  upon 
the  entire  subsequent  course  of  evolutionary  thought 
in  scientific  Europe.  True,  owing  to  the  retrograde 
tendencies  of  the  First  Empire,  it  caused  but  little 
immediate  stir  at  the  precise  moment  of  its  first  publica- 
tion ;  but  the  seed  it  sowed  sank  deep,  and,  lying  fallow 
long  in  men's  minds,  bore  fruit  at  last  in  the  next  gener- 
ation with  the  marvellous  fecundity  of  the  germs  of 
genius.  Indeed,  from  the  very  beginning  of  the  present 
century,  a  ferment  of  inquiry  on  the  subject  of  creation 
and  evolution  was  everywhere  obvious  among  speculative 
tliinkers.  The  pBofound  interest  which  Goethe  took  in 
the  dispute  on  this  very  subject  in  the  French  Academie 
des  Sciences  between  Cuvier  and  Geofiroy  St.  Hilaire, 
amid  the  thundering  guns  of  a  threatened  European 
convulsion,  was  but  a  solitary  symptom  of  the  general 
stir  which  preceded  the  gestation  and  birth  of  the  Dar- 
winian hypothesis.  It  is  impossible  to  take  up  any 
scientific  memoirs  or  treatises  of  the  first  half  of  our  own 
century  without  seeing  at  a  glance  how  every  mind  of 
high  original  scientific  importance  was  permeated  and 
disturbed  by  the  fundamental  questions  aroused,  but 
not  fully  answered,  by  Bufibn,  Lamarck,  and  Erasmus 
Darwin.     In  Lyell's  letters  and  in  Agassiz's  lectures,  in 


The  World  into  which  Darwin  was  Born   13 

the  '  Botanic  Journal '  and  the  *  Philosopliical  Transac- 
tions,' in  treatises  on  ^Madeira  beetles  and  the  Australian 
flora,  we  find  everywhere  the  thoughts  of  men  pro- 
foundly influenced  in  a  thousand  directions  by  this 
universal  evolutionary  solvent  and  leaven. 

And  while  the  world  of  thought  was  thus  seething  and 
moving  restlessly  before  the  wave  of  ideas  set  in  motion 
by  these  various  independent  philosophers,  another 
group  of  causes  in  another  field  was  rendering  smooth 
the  path  beforehand  for  the  future  champion  of  the 
amended  evolutionism.  Geology  on  the  one  hand  and 
astronomy  on  the  other  were  making  men's  minds 
gradually  familiar  with  the  conception  of  slow  natural 
development,  as  opposed  to  immediate  and  miraculous 
creation. 

The  rise  of  geology  had  been  rapid  and  brilliant. 
In  the  last  century  it  had  been  almost  universally 
believed  that  fossil  organisms  were  the  relics  of  sub- 
merged and  destroyed  worlds,  strange  remnants  of 
successive  terrible  mundane  catastrophes.  Cuvier 
himself,  who  had  rendered  immense  services  to  geo- 
logical science  by  his  almost  unerring  reconstructions 
of  extinct  animals,  remained  a  partisan  of  the  old 
theory  of  constant  cataclysms  and  fresh  creations 
throughout  his  whole  life ;  but  Lamarck,  here  as  else- 
where the  prophet  of  the  modern  uniformitarian  con- 
cept of  nature,  had  already  announced  his  grand  idea 
that  the  ordinary  process  of  natural  laws  sufficed  to 
account  for  all  the  phenomena  of  the  earth's  crust.  In 
England,  William  Smith,  the  ingenious  land  surveyor, 
riding  up  and  down  on  his  daily  task  over  the  face  of 
the  country,  became  convinced  by  his  observations  in 


14  Charles  Darwin 

the  first  years  of  the  present  century  that  a  fixed  order 
of  sequence  could  everywhere  be  traced  among  the 
various  superincumbent  geological  strata.  Modem 
scientific  geology  takes  its  rise  from  the  moment  of  this 
luminous  and  luminiferous  discovery.  With  astonishing 
rapidity  the  sequence  of  strata  was  everywhere  noted, 
and  the  succession  of  characteristic  fossils  mapped  out, 
with  the  result  of  showing,  however  imperfectly  at  first, 
that  the  history  of  organic  life  upon  the  globe  had 
followed  a  slow  and  regular  course  of  constant  develop- 
ment. Immediately  whole  schools  of  eager  workers 
employed  themselves  in  investigating  in  separate  detail 
the  phenomena  of  these  successive  stages  of  unfolding 
life.  Murchison,  fresh  from  the  Peninsular  campaign, 
began  to  study  the  dawn  of  organic  history  in  the  gloom 
of  the  Silurian  and  Cambrian  epochs.  A  group  of  less 
articulate  but  not  less  active  workers  like  Buckland  and 
Mantell  performed  similar  services  for  the  carboniferous, 
the  wealden,  and  the  tertiary  deposits.  Sedgwick  en- 
deavoured to  co-ordinate  the  whole  range  of  then  known 
facts  into  a  single  wide  and  comprehensive  survey.  De 
La  Beche,  Phillipps,  and  Agassiz  added  their  share  to 
the  great  work  of  reconstruction.  Last  of  all,  among 
those  who  were  contemporary  and  all  but  coeval  with 
Charles  Darwin  himself,  Lyell  boldly  fought  out  the 
battle  of  '  nniformitarianism,'  proving,  with  all  the 
accumulated  weight  of  his  encyclopedic  and  world- 
wide knowledge,  that  every  Igiown  feature  of  geological 
development  could  be  traced  to  the -agency  of  causes 
now  in  action,  and  illustrated  by  means  of  slow  secular 
changes  still  actually  taking  place  on  earth  before  our 
very  eyes. 


The  World  into  which  Darwin  was  Born    15 

The  influence  of  these  novel  conceptions  upon  the 
growth  and  spread  of  evolutionary  ideas  was  far-reach- 
ing and  twofold.  In  the  first  place,  the  discovery  of 
a  definite  succession  of  nearly  related  organic  forms, 
following  one  another  with  evident  closeness  through 
the  various  ages,  inevitably  suggested  to  eveiy  inquiring 
observer  the  possibility  of  their  direct  descent  one  from 
the  other.  In  the  second  place,  the  discovery  that 
geological  formations  were  not  really  separated  each 
from  its  predecessor  by  violent  revolutions,  but  were  the 
result  of  gradual  and  ordinary  changes,  discredited  the 
old  idea  of  frequent  fresh  creations  after  each  cata- 
strophe, and  familiarised  the  minds  of  men  of  science 
with  the  alternative  notion  of  slow  and  natural  evolu- 
tionary processes.  The  past  was  seen  to  be  in  effect  the 
parent  of  tlie  present;  the  present  was  recognised  as 
the  child  of  the  past. 

Current  astronomical  theories  also  pointed  inevit- 
ably in  the  same  direction.  Kant,  whose  supereminent 
fame  as  a  philosopher  has  almost  overshadowed  his  just 
claims  as  a  profound  thinker  in  physical  science,  had 
already  in  the  third  quarter  of  the  eighteenth  century 
arrived  at  his  sublime  nebular  hypothesis,  in  which  he 
suggested  the  possible  development  of  stars,  suns,  planets, 
and  satellites  by  the  slow  contraction  of  very  diffuse  and 
incandescent  haze-clouds.  This  magnificent  cosmical  con- 
ception was  seized  and  adapted  by  the  genius  of  Laplace 
in  his  celestial  system,  and  made  familiar  through  his 
great  work  to  thinking  minds  throughout  the  whole  of 
Europe.  In  England  it  was  further  modified  and 
remodelled  by  Sir  William  Herschel,  whose  period  of 
active   investigation    coincided    in   part   with   Charles 


1 6  Charles  Darwin 

Darwin's  early  boyhood.  The  bearings  of  the  nebular 
hypothesis  upon  the  rise  of  Darwinian  evolutionism  are 
by  no  means  remote :  the  entire  modern  scientific 
movement  forms,  in  fact,  a  single  great  organic  whole, 
of  which  the  special  doctrine  of  biological  development 
is  but  a  small  separate  integral  part.  All  the  theories 
and  doctrines  which  go  to  make  it  up  display  the  one 
common  trait  that  they  reject  the  idea  of  direct  creative 
interposition  from  without,  and  attribute  the  entire 
existing  order  of  nature  to  the  regular  unfolding  of  one 
undeviating  continuous  law. 

Yet  another  factor  in  the  intellectual  stir  and  bustle 
of  the  time  must  needs  be  mentioned  even  in  so  short 
and  cursory  a  sketch  as  this  of  the  causes  which  led  to 
the  Darwinian  crisis.  In  1798,  Thomas  Malthus,  a 
clergyman  of  the  Church  of  England,  published  the 
first  edition  of  his  famous  and  much-debated  '  Essay  on 
the  Principle  of  Population.'  Malthus  was  the  first 
person  who  ever  called  public  attention  to  the  tendency 
of  population  to  increase  up  to  the  utmost  limit  of  sub- 
sistence, as  well  as  to  the  necessary  influence  of  starvation 
in  checking  its  further  development  beyond  that  point- 
Though  his  essay  dealt  only  with  the  question  of  repro- 
duction in  human  societies,  it  was  clear  that  it  possessed 
innumerable  analogies  in  every  domain  of  animal  and 
vegetable  life.  The  book  ran  through  many  successive 
editions  with  extraordinary  rapidity  for  a  work  of  its 
class,  it  was  fiercely  attacked  and  bravely  defended, 
it  caused  an  immense  amount  of  discussion  and  debate, 
and  besides  its  marvellous  direct  influence  as  a  germinal 
power  upon  the  whole  subsequent  course  of  politico- 
economical  and  sociological  thought,  it  produced  also  a 


The  World  into  which  Darwin  was  Born   17 

remarkable  indirect  influence  on  the  side  current  of 
biological  and  speculative  opinion.  In  particular,  as  we 
stall  more  fully  see  hereafter,  it  had  an  immediate  effect 
in  suggesting  to  the  mind  of  the  great  naturalist  who 
forms  our  present  subject  the  embryo  idea  of  '  natural 
selection.' 

Such  then  was  the  intellectual  and  social  world  into 
which,  early  in  the  present  century,  Charles  Darwin 
found  himself  bom.  Everywhere  around  him  in  his 
childhood  and  youth  these  great  but  formless  evolu- 
tionary ideas  were  brewing  and  fermenting.  The 
scientific  society  of  his  elders  and  of  the  contemporaries 
among  whom  he  grew  up  was  permeated  with  the 
leaven  of  Laplace  and  of  Lamarck,  of  Hutton  and  of 
Herschel.  Inquiry  was  especially  everywhere  rife  as 
to  the  origin  and  nature  of  specific  distinctions  among 
plants  and  animals.  Those  who  believed  in  the  doctrine 
of  Buffon  and  of  the  *  Zoonomia '  and  those  who  dis- 
believed in  it,  alike,  were  profoundly  interested  and 
agitated  in  soul  by  the  far-reaching  implications  of 
that  fundamental  problem.  On  every  side  evolutionism, 
in  its  crude  form,  was  already  in  the  air.  Long  before 
Charles  Darwin  himself  published  his  conclusive  '  Origin 
of  Species,'  every  thinking  mind  in  the  world  of  science, 
elder  and  younger,  was  deeply  engaged  upon  the  self-same 
problem.  Lyell  and  Horner  in  alternate  fits  were  doubt- 
ing and  debating.  Herbert  Spencer  had  already  frankly 
accepted  the  new  idea  with  the  profound  conviction  of 
a  priori  reasoning.  Agassiz  was  hesitating  and  raising 
difficulties.  Treviranus  was  ardently  proclaiming  his  un- 
flinching adhesion.  Oken  was  spinning  in  metaphy- 
sical Germany  his  fanciful  parodies  of  tjie  Ijamarckian 
3 


1 8  Charles  Darwin 

hypothesis.  Among  the  depths  of  Brazilian  forests  Bates 
was  reading  the  story  of  evolution  on  the  gauze-like 
wings  of  tropical  butterflies.  Under  the  scanty  shade  of 
Malayan  palm-trees  Wallace  was  independently  spelling 
out  in  rude  outline  the  very  theory  of  stirvival  of  the 
fittest,  which  Charles  Darwin  himself  was  simultaneously 
perfecting  and  polishing  among  the  memoirs  and  pam- 
phlets of  his  English  study.  WoUaston  in  Madeira  was 
pointing  out  the  strange  adaptations  of  the  curious  local 
snaUs  and  beetles.  Von  Buch  in  the  Canaries  was 
coming  to  the  conclusion  that  varieties  may  be  slowly 
changed  into  permanent  species.  Lecoq  and  Von  Baer 
were  gradually  arriving,  one  by  the  botanical  route,  the 
other  by  the  embryological,  at  the  same  opinion.  Before 
Charles  Darwin  was  twenty,  Dean  Herbert  had  declared 
from  the  profound  depth  of  his  horticultural  knowledge 
that  kinds  were  only  mere  fixed  sports ;  and  Patrick 
Matthew,  in  the  appendix  to  a  work  on  *  Naval  Timber,' 
had  casually  developed,  without  perceiving  its  import- 
ance, the  actual  distinctive  Darwinian  doctrine  of  natural 
selection.  Robert  Chambers  published  in  1844  his 
'  Vestiges  of  Creation,'  in  which  Lamarck's  theory  was 
impressed  and  popularised  under  a  somewhat  spoilt  and 
mistaken  form :  it  was  not  till  1859  that  the  first 
edition  of  the  '  Origin  of  Species '  burst  like  a  thunder- 
bolt upon  the  astonished  world  of  unprepared  and 
unscientific  thinkers. 

This  general  attitude  of  interest  and  inquiry  is  of 
deep  importance  to  the  proper  comprehension  of  Charles 
Darwin's  life  and  work,  and  that  for  two  distinct  reasons. 
In  the  first  place,  the  universal  stir  and  deep  prying 
into  evolutionary  questions  which  everywhere  existed 


The  World  into  which  Darwin  was  Born   19 

among  scientific  men  in  his  early  days  was  naturally 
communicated  to  a  lad  bom  of  a  scientific  family,  and 
inheriting  directly  in  blood  and  bone  the  biological 
tastes  and  tendencies  of  Erasmus  Darwin.  In  the 
second  place,  the  existence  of  such  a  deep  and  wide- 
spread curiosity  as  to  ultimate  origins,  and  the  common 
prevalence  of  profound  uniformitarian  and  evolutionary 
views  among  philosophers  and  thinkers,  made  the  accept- 
ance of  Charles  Darwin's  particular  theory,  when  it  at 
last  arrived,  a  comparatively  easy  and  certain  matter, 
because  by  it  the  course  of  organic  development  was 
assimilated,  on  credible  grounds,  to  the  course  of  all 
other  development  in  general,  as  then  already  widely 
recognised.  The  first  consideration  helps  us  to  account 
in  part  for  the  man  himself;  the  second  consideration 
helps  us  even  more  to  account  for  the  great  work  which 
ho  was  enabled  in  the  end  so  successfully  to  accomplish. 


20  Charles  Darwin 


CHAPTER  II. 

CHARLES  DAEWIN  AND  HIS  ANTECEDENTS. 

From  the  environment  let  us  turn  to  the  individual ; 
from  the  world  in  which  the  man  moved  to  the  man  who 
moved  in  it,  and  was  in  time  destined  to  move  it. 

Who  was  he,  and  whence  did  he  derive  his  excep- 
tional energy  and  intellectual  panoply  ? 

Erasmus  Danvin,  the  grandfather,  the  first  of  the  line 
in  whom  the  distinctive  Darwinian  strain  of  intellect 
overtly  displayed  itself,  was  the  son  of  one  Robert 
Darwin,  a  gentleman  of  Nottinghamshire,  '  a  person  of 
curiosity,'  with  '  a  taste  for  literature  and  science ; '  so 
that  for  four  generations  at  least,  in  the  paternal  line, 
the  peculiar  talents  of  the  Darwin  family  had  been 
highly  cultivated  in  either  direction.  Robert  Darwin 
was  an  early  member  of  the  Spalding  Club,  a  friend  of 
Stukeley  the  antiquary,  and  an  embryo  geologist,  after 
the  fantastic,  half-superstitious  fashion  of  his  own  time. 
Of  his  four  sons,  both  Robert,  the  eldest,  and  Erasmus, 
the  youngest,  were  authors  and  botanists.  Erasmus 
himself  was  a  Cambridge  man,  and  his  natural  bent  of 
mind  and  energy  led  him  irresistibly  on  to  the  study  of 
medicine.  Taking  his  medical  degree  at  his  own  uni- 
versity, and  afterwards  preparing  for  practice  by  attend- 


Charles  Darwin  and  his  Antecedents    21 

ing  Hunter's  lectures  in  London,  besides  going  through 
the  regular  medical  course  at  Edinburgh,  the  young 
doctor  finally  settled  down  as  a  physician  at  Nottingham, 
whence  shortly  afterward  he  removed  to  Lichfield,  then 
the  centre  of  a  famous  literary  coterie.  So  large  a  part 
of  Charles  Darwin's  remarkable  idiosyncrasy  was  derived 
by  heredity  from  his  paternal  gi'andfather,  that  it  may  be 
worth  while  to  dwell  a  little  here  in  passing  on  the 
character  and  career  of  this  brilliant  precursor  of  the 
great  evolutionist.  Both  in  the  physical  and  in  the 
spiiitual  sense,  Erasmus  Darwin  was  one  among  the 
truest  and  most  genuine  ancestors  of  his  grandson 
Charles. 

A  powerful,  robust,  athletic  man,  in  florid  health 
and  of  temperate  habits,  yet  with  the  full-blooded  ten- 
dency of  the  eighteenth  century  vividly  displayed  in  his 
ample  face  and  broad  features,  Erasmus  Darwin  bubbled 
over  with  irrepressible  vivacity,  the  outward  and  visible 
sign  of  that  overflowing  energy  which  forms  everywhere 
one  of  the  most  marked  determining  conditions  of  high 
genius.  Strong  in  body  and  strong  in  mind,  a  tee- 
totaler before  teetotalism,  an  abolitionist  before  the  anti- 
slavery  movement,  he  had  a  great  contempt  for  weak- 
nesses and  prejudices  of  every  sort,  and  he  rose  far 
superior  to  the  age  in  which  he  lived  in  breadth  of  view 
and  freedom  from  preconceptions.  The  eighteenth  cen- 
tury considered  him,  in  its  cautious,  cut-and-dried 
fashion,  a  man  of  singular  talent  but  of  remarkably 
eccentric  and  unsafe  opinions.  Unfortunately  for  his 
lasting  fame.  Dr.  Darwin  was  much  given  to  writing 
poetry ;  and  this  poetry,  though  as  ingenious  as  every- 
thing   else    he    did,    had    a    certain    false    gallop   of 


22  Charles  Darwin 

verse  about  it  which  has  doomed  it  to  become  since 
Canning's  parody  a  sort  of  warning  beacon  against  the 
worst  faults  of  the  post- Augustan  decadence  in  the 
ten-syllabled  metre.  Nobody  now  reads  the  '  Botanic 
Garden'  except  either  to  laugh  at  its  exquisite  ex- 
travagances, or  to  wonder  at  the  queer  tinsel  glitter  of 
its  occasional  clever  rhetorical  rhapsodies. 

But  iu  his  alternative  character  of  philosophic 
biologist,  rejected  by  the  age  which  swallowed  his 
poetry  all  applausive,  Erasmus  Darvvin  is  well  worthy 
of  the  highest  and  deepest  respect,  as  a  prime  founder 
and  early  prophet  of  the  evolutionary  system.  His 
*  Zoonomia,'  '  which,  though  ingenious,  is  built  upon  the 
most  absurd  hypothesis ' — as  men  still  said  only  thirty 
years  ago — contains  in  the  germ  the  whole  theory  of 
organic  development  as  understood  up  to  the  very 
moment  of  the  publication  of  the  *  Origin  of  Species.* 
In  it  Dr.  Darwin  calls  attention  to  '  the  great  changes 
introduced  into  various  animals  by  artificial  or  acci- 
dental cultivation,'  a  subject  afterwards  fully  elucidated 
by  his  greater  grandson  in  his  work  on  '  The  Variation 
of  Animals  and  Plants  under  Domestication,'  He 
specially  notes  '  the  immense  changes  of  shape  and 
colour'  produced  by  man  in  rabbits  and  pigeons,  the 
very  species  on  which  Charles  Darwin  subsequently 
made  some  of  his  most  remarkable  and  interesting  ob- 
servations. More  than  any  previous  writer,  Erasmus 
Darwin,  with  '  prophetic  sagacity,'  insisted  strongly  on 
the  essential  unity  of  parent  and  offspring — a  truth 
which  lies  at  the  very  base  of  all  modern  philosophical 
biology.  *  Owing  to  the  imperfection  of  language,' 
wrote  the  Lichfield  doctor  nearly  a  hundred  years  ago, 


Charles  Darwin  and  his  Antecedents   23 

'the  offspring  is  termed  a  new  animal,  but  is  in  truth  a 
branch  or  elongation  of  the  parent,  since  a  part  of  the 
embryon-animal  is  or  was  a  part  of  the  parent,  and 
therefore  may  retain  some  of  the  habits  of  the  parent 
system.'  He  laid  peculiar  stress  upon  the  hereditary 
natlire  of  some  acquired  properties,  such  as  the  muscles 
of  dancers  or  jugglers,  and  the  diseases  incidental  to 
special  occupations.  Nay,  he  even  anticipated  his  great 
descendant  in  pointing  out  that  varieties  are  often  pro- 
duced at  first  as  mere  '  sports  '  or  accidental  variations, 
as  in  the  case  of  six-fingered  men,  five-clawed  fowls,  or 
extra-toed  cats,  and  are  afterwards  handed  do^vn  by 
heredity  to  succeeding  generations.  Charles  Darwin 
would  have  added  that  if  these  new  stray  peculiarities 
happened  to  prove  advantageous  to  the  species  they 
would  be  naturally  favoured  in  the  struggle  for  exist- 
ence, while  if  they  proved  disadvantageous,  or  even 
neutral,  they  would  die  out  at  once  or  be  bred  out  in 
the  course  of  a  few  crosses.  That  last  truth  of  natural 
selection  was  the  only  cardinal  one  in  the  evolutionary 
system  on  which  Erasmus  Darwin  did  not  actually  fore- 
stall his  more  famous  and  greater  namesake.  For  its 
full  perception,  the  discovery  of  Malthus  had  to  be 
collated  with  the  speculations  of  Buffon. 

'  When  we  revolve  in  our  minds,'  says  the  eighteenth 
century  prophet  of  evolution,  'the  great  similarity  of 
structure  which  obtains  in  all  the  warm-blooded  animals, 
as  well  quadrupeds,  birds,  and  amphibious  animals, 
as  in  mankind ;  from  the  mouse  and  bat  to  the  elephant 
and  whale  ;  one  is  led  to  conclude  that  they  have  alike 
been  produced  from  a  similar  living  filament.  In  some 
this  filament  in  its  advance  to  maturity  has  acquired 


24  Charles  Darwin 

hauds  and  fingers  with  a  fine  sense  of  touch,  as  in  man- 
kind. In  others  it  has  acquired  claws  or  talons,  as  in 
tigers  and  eagles.  In  others,  toes  with  an  intervening 
web  or  membrane,  as  in  seals  and  geese.  In  others  it 
has  acquired  cloven  hoofs,  as  in  cows  and  swine ;  and 
whole  hoofs  in  others,  as  in  the  horse  :  while  in  the 
bird  kind  this  original  living  filament  has  put  forth 
wings  instead  of  arms  or  legs,  and  feathers  instead  of 
hair.'  This  is  a  very  crude  form  of  evolutionism  indeed, 
but  it  is  leading  up  by  gradual  stages  to  the  finished 
and  all-sided  philosophy  of  physical  life,  which  at  last 
definitely  formulates  itself  through  the  mouth  of 
Charles  Darwin.  We  shall  see  hereafter  wherein 
Erasmus  Darwin's  conception  of  development  chiefly 
failed — in  attributing  evolution  for  the  most  part  to  the 
exertions  and  endeavours  of  the  animal  itself,  rather 
than  to  inevitable  survival  of  the  fittest  among  innu- 
merable spontaneous  variations — but  we  must  at  least 
conclude  our  glimpse  of  his  pregnant  and  suggestive 
work  by  quoting  its  great  fundamental  apergu : — '  As 
the  earth  and  ocean  were  probably  peopled  with  vege- 
table productions  long  before  the  existence  of  animals, 
and  many  families  of  these  animals  long  before  other 
families  of  them,  shall  we  conjecture  that  one  and  the 
same  kind  of  living  filament  is  and  has  been  the  cause 
of  all  organic  life  ?  * 

A  few  lines  from  the  '  Temple  of  Nature,'  one  of 
Erasmus  Darwin's  poetic  rhapsodies,  containing  his  fully 
matured  views  on  the  origin  of  living  creatures,  may 
be  worth  reproduction  in  further  elucidation  of  his 
philosophical  position :— 


Charles  Darwin  and  his  Antecedents  2$ 

'  Organic  life  beneath  tlie  shoreless  waves 
Was  born,  and  nursed  in  ocean's  pearly  caves ; 
First  forms  minute,  unseen  by  spheric  glass, 
Move  on  the  mud,  or  pierce  the  watery  mass ; 
These,  as  successive  generations  bloom, 
New  powers  acquire,  and  larger  limbs  assume ; 
"Whence  countless  groups  of  vegetation  spring, 
And  breatliing  realms  of  fin  and  feet  and  wing.' 

Have  we  not  here  the  very  beginnings  of  Charles 
Darwin  ?  Do  we  not  see,  in  these  profound  and  funda- 
mental suggestions,  not  merely  hints  as  to  the  evolu- 
tion of  evolution,  but  also  as  to  the  evolution  of  the 
evolutionist  ? 

On  the  other  hand,  though  Erasmus  Darwin  defined 
a  fool  to  his  friend  Edgeworth  as  '  a  man  who  never 
tried  an  experiment  in  his  life,'  he  was  wanting  himself 
in  the  rigorous  and  patient  inductive  habit  which  so 
strikingly  distinguished  his  grandson  Charles.  That 
trait,  as  we  shall  presently  see,  the  biological  chief  of 
the  nineteenth  century  derived  ia  all  probability  from 
another  root  of  his  genealogical  tree.  Erasmus  Darwin 
gave  us  brilliant  suggestions  rather  than  cumulative 
proof :  he  apologised  in  his  *  Zoonomia '  for  '  many  con- 
jectures not  supported  by  accurate  investigation  or  con- 
clusive experiments.'  Such  an  apology  would  have 
been  simply  impossible  to  the  painstaking  spirit  of  his 
grandson  Charles. 

Erasmus  Darwin  was  twice  married.  His  first  wife 
was  Mary,  daughter  of  Mr.  Charles  Howard,  of  Lichfield, 
and  it  was  her  son,  Robert  Waring  Darwin,  who  be- 
came the  father  of  our  hero,  Charles.  It  is  fashionable 
to  say,  in  this  and  sundry  other  like  cases,  that  the 
mental  energy  skips  a  generation.     People  have  said  so 


26  Charles  Darwin 

in  the  case  of  that  intermediate  Mendelssohn  who  was 
son  of  Moses  Mendelssohn,  the  philosopher,  and  father 
of  Felix  Bartholdy  Mendelssohn,  the  composer — that 
mere  link  in  a  marvellous  chain  who  was  wont  to 
observe  of  himself  in  the  decline  of  life,  that  in 
his  youth  he  was  called  the  son  of  the  great  Men- 
delssohn, and  in  his  old  age  the  father  of  the  great 
Mendelssohn.  As  a  matter  of  fact,  one  may  fairly 
doubt  whether  such  a  case  of  actual  skipping  is  ever 
possible  in  the  nature  of  things.  In  the  particular 
instance  of  Robert  Waring  Darwin  at  least  we  may  be 
pretty  sure  that  the  distinctive  Darwinian  strain  of 
genius  lay  merely  latent  rather  than  dormant :  that  it 
did  not  display  itself  to  the  world  at  large,  but  that  it 
persisted  silently  as  powerful  as  ever  within  the  remote 
recesses  of  the  thinking  organism.  Not  every  man 
brings  out  before  men  all  that  is  within  him.  Robert 
Waring  Darwin  was  a  physician  at  Shrewsbury;  and 
he  attained  at  least  sufficient  scientific  eminence  in  his 
own  time  to^  become  a  Fellow  of  the  Royal  Society,  in 
days  when  that  honour  was  certainly  not  readily  con- 
ferred upon  country  doctors  of  modest  reputation. 
Charles  Darwin  says  of  iim  plainly,  '  He  was  incom- 
parably the  most  acute  observer  whom  I  ever  knew.' 
It  may  well  have  been  that  Robert  Darwin  lived  and 
died,  as  his  famous  son  lived  for  fifty  years  of  his  great 
life,  in  comparative  silence  and  learned  retirement ;  for 
we  must  never  forget  that  if  Charles  Darwin  had  only 
completed  the  first  half  century  of  his  laborious  exist- 
ence, he  would  have  been  remembered  merely  as  the 
author  of  an  entertaining  work  on  the  voyage  of  the 
'Beagle,'  a  plausible   theory  of  coral   islands,  and   a 


Charles  Darwin  and  his  Antecedents   27 

learned  monograph  on  the  fossil  barnacles.  During 
all  those  years,  in  fact,  he  had  really  done  little  else 
than  collect  material  for  the  work  of  his  lifetime.  If 
we  judge  men  by  outward  performance  only,  we  may 
often  be  greatly  mistaken  in  our  estimates :  poten- 
tiality is  wider  than  actuality;  what  a  man  does  is 
never  a  certain  or  extreme  criterion  of  what  he  can 
do. 

The  Darwins,  indeed,  were  all  a  mighty  folk,  of 
varied  powers  and  varied  attainments.  Erasmus's 
brother,  Robert,  was  the  author  of  a  work  on  botany, 
which  long  enjoyed  a  respectable  repute.  Of  his  sons, 
one,  Sir  Francis  Darwin,  was  noted  as  a  keen  observer 
of  animals ;  a  second,  Charles,  who  died  at  twenty-one, 
was  already  the  author  of  a  very  valuable  medical 
essay ;  while  the  third,  Robert,  was  the  Shrewsbury 
F.R.S.,  the  father  of  our  great  evolutionary  thinker. 
And  among  Charles  Darwin's  own  cousins,  one  is  Mr. 
Hensleigh  Wedgwood,  the  philologist ;  a  second  was  the 
late  Sir  Henry  Holland ;  and  a  third  is  .Mr.  Francis 
Galton,  the  author  of  that  essentially  Darwinian  book, 
'  Hereditary  Genius.' 

Robert  Waring  Darwin  took  to  himself  a  wife  from 
another  very  great  and  eminent  family.  He  married 
Susannah  Wedgwood,  daughter  of  Josiah  Wedgwood, 
the  famous  potter ;  and  from  these  two  silent  repre- 
sentatives of  powerful  stocks,  Charles  Robert  Darwin, 
the  father  of  modern  evolutionary  biology,  was  born  at 
Shrewsbury,  on  February  the  12th,  1809.  That  Wedg- 
wood connection,  again,  is  no  mere  casual  or  unimportant 
incident  in  the  previous  life-history  of  the  Darwinian 
originality ;  it  throws  a  separate  clear  light  of  its  own 


28  Charles  Darwin 

upon  the  peculiar  and  admirably  compounded  idiosyn- 
crasy of  Charles  Darwin. 

A  man,  indeed,  owes  on  the  average  quite  as  much 
to  his  mother's  as  to  his  father's  family.  It  is  a  mere 
unscientific  old-world  prejudice  which  makes  us  for 
the  most  part  count  ancestry  in  the  direct  ascending 
male  line  alone,  to  the  complete  neglect  of  the  equally 
important  maternal  pedigree.  From  the  biological 
point  of  view,  at  least,  every  individual  is  a  highly  com- 
plex compound  of  hereditary  elements,  a  resultant  of 
numerous  converging  forces,  a  meeting  place  of  two 
great  streams  of  inheritance,  each  of  which  is  itself 
similarly  made  up  by  the  like  confluence  of  innumerable 
distinct  prior  tributaries.  Between  these  two  it  is 
almost  impossible  for  us  accurately  to  distribute  any 
given  individuality.  How  much  Charles  Darwin  owed 
to  the  Darwins,  and  how  much  he  owed  in  turn  to  the 
Wedgwoods,  no  man  is  yet  psychologist  enough  or  phy- 
siologist enough  to  say.  But  that  he  owed  a  great  deal 
to  either  strong  and  vigorous  strain  we  may  even  now 
quite  safely  take  for  granted. 

The  Wedgwood  family  were  '  throwers  '  by  handi- 
craft, superior  artisans  long  settled  at  Burslem,  in  the 
Staffordshire  potteries.  Josiah,  the  youngest  of  thirteen 
children,  lamed  by  illness  in  early  life,  was  turned  by 
this  happy  accident  from  his  primitive  task  as  a 
*  thrower  '  to  the  more  artistic  and  original  work  of  pro- 
ducing ornamental  coloured  earthenware.  Skilful  and 
indefatigable,  of  indomitable  energy  and  with  great 
powers  of  forcing  his  way  in  life  against  all  obstacles, 
young  Wedgwood  rose  rapidly  by  his  own  unaided 
exertions  to  be  a  master  potter,  and  a  manufacturer  of 


Charles  Darwin  and  his  Antecedents    29 

the  famous  unglazed  black  porcelain.  Those  were  the 
darkest  days  of  industrial  art  and  decorative  handicraft 
in  modern  England.  Josiah  Wedgwood,  by  his  marked 
originality  and  force  of  character,  succeeded  in  turning 
the  current  of  national  taste,  and  creating  among  us  a 
new  and  distinctly  higher  type  of  artistic  workman- 
ship. His  activity,  however,  was  not  confined  to  his 
art  alone,  but  found  itself  a  hundred  other  different 
outlets  in  the  most  varied  directions.  When  his  pot- 
teries needed  enlargement  to  meet  the  increased 
demand,  he  founded  for  the  hands  employed  upon  his 
works  the  model  industrial  village  of  Etruria.  When 
Brindley  began  cutting  artificial  waterways  across  the 
broad  face  of  central  England,  it  was  in  the  great  potter 
that  he  found  his  chief  ally  in  promoting  the  construc- 
tion of  the  Grand  Trunk  Canal.  Wedgwood,  indeed, 
was  a  builder  of  schools  and  a  maker  of  roads ;  a 
chemist  and  an  artist ;  a  friend  of  Watt  and  an  employer 
of  Flaxman.  In  short,  like  Erasmus  Darwin,  he  pos- 
sessed that  prime  essential  in  the  character  of  genius, 
an  immense  underlying  stock  of  energy.  And  with  it 
there  went  its  best  concomitant,  the  '  infinite  capacity 
for  taking  pains.'  Is  it  not  probable  that  in  their  joint 
descendant,  the  brilliant  but  discursive  and  hazardous 
genius  of  Erasmus  Darwin  was  balanced  and  regulated 
by  soberer  qualities  inherited  directly  from  the  profound 
industry  of  the  painstaking  potter  ?  When  later  on 
we  find  Charles  Darwin  spending  hours  in  noting  the 
successive  movements  of  the  tendrils  in  a  plant,  or 
watching  for  long  years  the  habits  and  manners  of 
earthworms  in  flower-pots,  may  we  not  reasonably  con- 
jecture that  he  derived  no  little  share  of  his  extraordi- 


30  Charles  Darwin 

nary  patience,  carefulness,  and  minuteness  of  handicraft 
from  his  mother's  father,  Josiah  Wedgwood  ? 

Such,  then,  were  the  two  main  component  elements, 
paternal  and  maternal,  from  which  the  striking  person- 
ality of  Charles  Darwin  was  no  doubt  for  the  most  part 
ultimately  built  up. 


CHAPTER  III. 

EARLY   DAYS. 

As  the  Chester  express  steams  out  of  Shrewsbury 
station,  you  see  on  your  left,  overhanging  the  steep  bank 
of  Severn,  a  large,  square,  substantial-looking  house, 
known  as  the  Mount,  the  birthplace  of  the  author  of 
the  '  Origin  of  Species.'  There,  in  the  comfortable 
home  he  had  built  for  himself.  Dr.  Robert  Darwin,  the 
father,  lived  and  worked  for  fifty  years  of  unobtrusive 
usefulness.  He  had  studied  medicine  at  Edinburgh  and 
Leyden,  and  had  even  travelled  a  little  in  Germany, 
before  he  settled  down  in  the  quiet  old  Salopian  town, 
where  for  half  a  century  his  portly  figure  and  yellow 
chaise  were  familiar  objects  of  the  country-side  for 
miles  around.  Among  a  literary  society  which  included 
Coleridge's  friends,  the  Tayleurs,  and  where  Hazlitt 
listened  with  delight  to  the  great  poet's  '  music  of  the 
spheres,'  in  High  Street  Unitarian  Chapel,  the  Mount 
kept  up  with  becoming  dignity  the  family  traditions  of 
the  Darwins  and  the  Wedgwoods  as  a  local  centre  of 
sweetness  and  light. 

On  February  the  12th,  1809,  Chai-les  Darwin  first 
saw  the  light  of  day  in  this  his  father's  house  at  Shrews- 
bury.    Time  and  place  were  both  propitious.     Born  in 


32  Charles  Darwin 

a  cultivated  scientific  family,  surrounded  from  his  birth 
by  elevating  influences,  and  secured  beforehand  from  the 
cramping  necessity  of  earning  his  own  livelihood  by  his 
own  exertions,  the  boy  was  destined  to  grow  up  to  full 
maturity  in  the  twenty-one  years  of  slow  development 
that  immediately  preceded  the  passing  of  the  first  Reform 
Act.  The  thunder  of  the  great  European  upheaval  had 
grown  silent  at  Waterloo  when  he  was  barely  six  years 
old,  and  his  boyhood  was  passed  amid  country  sights 
and  sounds  during  that  long  period  of  reconstruction 
and  assimilation  which  followed  the  fierce  volcanic 
outburst  of  the  French  Revolution.  Happy  in  the 
opportunity  of  his  birth,  he  came  upon  the  world  eight 
years  after  the  first  publication  of  Lamarck's  remarkable 
speculations,  and  for  the  first  twenty-two  years  of  his 
life  he  was  actually  the  far  younger  contemporary  of  the 
great  French  evolutionary  philosopher.  Eleven  years 
before  his  arrival  upon  the  scene  Malthus  had  set  forth 
his  '  Principle  of  Population.'  Charles  Darwin  thus 
entered  upon  a  stage  well  prepared  for  him,  and  he 
entered  it  with  an  idiosyncrasy  exactly  adapted  for 
making  the  best  of  the  situation.  The  soil  had  been 
thoroughly  turned  and  dressed  beforehand:  Charles 
Darwin's  seed  had  only  to  fall  upon  it  in  order  to  spring 
up  and  bear  fruit  a  hundredfold,  in  every  field  of  science 
or  speculation. 

For  it  was  not  biology  alone  that  he  was  foredoomed 
to  revolutionise,  but  the  whole  range  of  human  thought, 
and  perhaps  even  ultimately  of  human  action. 

Is  it  mere  national  prejudice  which  makes  one  add 
with  congratulatory  pleasure  that  Darwin  was  bom  in 
England,  rather  than  in  France,  in  Germany,  or  in 


Early  Days  33 

America  ?  Perhaps  so ;  perhaps  not.  For  the  English 
intellect  does  indeed  seem  more  capable  than  most  of 
uniting  high  speculative  ability  with  high  practical  skill 
and  experience :  and  of  that  union  of  rare  qualities 
Darwin  himself  was  a  most  conspicuous  example.  It  is 
probable  that  England  has  produced  more  of  the  great 
organising  and  systematising  intellects  than  any  other 
modem  country. 

Among  those  thinkers  in  his  own  line  who  stood 
more  nearly  abreast  of  Darwin  in  the  matter  of  age, 
Lyell  was  some  eleven  years  his  senior,  and  contributed 
not  a  little  (though  quite  unconsciously)  by  his  work 
and  conclusions  to  the  formation  of  Danvin's  OT\'n  pecu- 
liar scientific  opinions.  The  veteran  Owen,  who  still 
survives  him,  was  nearly  five  years  older  than  Darwin, 
and  also  helped  to  a  great  extent  in  giving  form 
and  exactness  to  his  great  contemporary's  anatomical 
ideas.  Humboldt,  who  preceded  our  English  naturalist 
in  the  matter  of  time  by  no  less  than  forty  years,  might 
yet  almost  rank  as  coeval  in  some  respects,  owing  to  his 
long  and  active  life,  his  late  maturity,  and  the  very 
recent  date  of  his  greatest  and  most  thought-compelling 
work,  the  *  Cosmos '  (begun  when  Humboldt  was 
seventy-five,  and  finished  when  he  lacked  but  ten  years 
of  his  century),  in  itself  a  sort  of  preparation  for  due 
acceptance  of  the  Darwinian  theories.  In  fact,  as 
many  as  fifty  years  of  their  joint  lives  coincided  entirely 
one  with  the  other's.  Agassiz  antedated  Darwin  by  two 
years.  On  the  other  hand,  among  the  men  who  most 
helped  on  the  recognition  of  Darwin's  theories,  Hooker 
and  Lewes  were  his  juniors  by  eight  years,  Herbert 
Spencer  by  eleven,  Wallace  by  thirteen,  and  Huxley 


34  Charles  Darwin 

by  sixteen.  His  cousin,  Francis  Galton,  another  grand- 
son of  Erasmus  Darwin,  and  joint  inheritor  of  the  dis- 
tinctive family  biological  ply,  was  bom  at  the  same 
date  as  Alfred  Russell  Wallace,  thirteen  years  after 
Charles  Darwin.  In  such  a  goodly  galaxy  of  workers 
was  the  Darwinian  light  destined  to  shine  through  the 
middle  of  the  century,  as  one  star  excelleth  another  in 
glory. 

Charles  Darwin  was  the  second  son :  but  nature 
refuses  doggedly  to  acknowledge  the  custom  of  primo- 
geniture. His  elder  brother,  Erasmus,  ia  man  of  mute 
and  inarticulate  ability,  with  a  sardonic  humour  alien 
to  his  race,  extorted  unwonted  praise  from  the  critical 
pen  of  Thomas  Carlyle,  who  *  for  intellect  rather  pre- 
ferred him  to  his  brother  Charles.'  But  whatever  spark 
of  the  Darwinian  genius  was  really  innate  in  Erasmus 
the  Less  died  with  him  unacknowledged. 

The  boy  was  educated  (so  they  call  it)  at  Shrews- 
bury Grammar  School,  under  sturdy  Sam  Butler,  after- 
wards Bishop  of  Lichfield ;  and  there  he  picked  up  so 
much  Latin  and  Greek  as  was  then  considered  absolutely 
essential  to  the  due  production  of  an  English  gentleman. 
Happily  for  the  world,  having  no  taste  for  the  classics,  he 
escaped  the  ordeal  with  little  injury  to  his  individuality. 
His  mother  had  died  while  he  was  stiU  a  child,  but  his 
father,  that  '  acute  observer,'  no  doubt  taught  him  to 
know  and  love  nature.  At  sixteen  he  went  to  Edin- 
burgh University,  then  rendered  famous  by  a  little  knot 
of  distinguished  professors,  and  there  he  remained  for  two 
years.  Already  at  school  he  had  made  himself  notable 
by  his  love  of  collecting — the  first  nascent  symptom  of  the 
naturalist  bent.     He  collected  everything,  shells,  eggs, 


Early  Days  35 

minerals,  coins,  nay,  since  postage  stamps  were  then  not 
yet  invented,  even  franks.  But  at  Edinburgh  he  gave  the 
earliest  distinct  evidence  of  his  definite  scientific  tastes 
by  contributing  to  the  local  academic  society  a  paper  on 
the  floating  eggs  of  the  common  sea-mat,  in  which  he 
had  even  then  succeeded  in  discovering  for  the  first 
time  organs  of  locomotion.  Thence  he  proceeded 
to  Christ's  College,  Cambridge.  The  Darwins  were 
luckily  a  Cambridge  family  :  luckily,  let  us  say,  for  had 
it  been  otherwise — had  young  Darwin  been  distorted 
from  his  native  bent  by  Plato  and  Aristotle,  and  plunged 
deep  into  the  mysteries  of  Barbara  and  Celarent,  as  would 
infallibly  have  happened  to  him  at  the  sister  university 
— who  can  tell  how  long  we  might  have  had  to  wait  in 
vain  for  the  '  Origin  of  Species '  and  the  *  Descent  of 
Man  '  ?  But  Cambridge,  which  rejoiced  already  in  the 
glory  of  Newton,  was  now  to  match  it  by  the  glory  of 
Darwin.  In  its  academical  course,  the  mathematical 
wedge  had  always  kept  open  a  dim  passage  for  physical 
science  ;  and  at  the  exact  moment  when  Darwin  was  an 
undergraduate  at  Christ's — from  1827  to  1831 — the 
university  had  the  advantage  of  several  good  scientific 
teachers,  and  amongst  them  one.  Professor  Henslow,  a 
well-known  botanist,  who  took  a  special  interest  in 
young  Darwin's  intellectual  development.  There,  too, 
he  met  with  Sedgwick,  Airy,  Ramsay,  and  numerous 
other  men  of  science,  whose  intercourse  with  him  must 
no  doubt  have  contributed  largely  to  mould  and  form 
the  future  cast  of  his  peculiar  philosophical  idiosyn- 
crasy. 

It  was  to  Henslow's  influence  that  Darwin  in  later 
years  attributed  in  great  part  his  powerful  taste  for 


36  Charles  Darwin 

natural  history.  But  in  truth  the  ascription  of  such 
high  praise  to  his  early  teacher  smacks  too  much  of  the 
Darwinian  modesty  to  be  accepted  at  once  without 
demur  by  the  candid  critic.  The  naturalist,  like  the 
poet,  is  born,  not  made.  How  much  more,  then,  must 
this  needs  be  the  case  with  the  grandson  of  Erasmus 
Darwin  and  of  Josiah  Wedgwood  ?  As  a  matter  of  fact, 
already  at  Edinburgh  the  lad  had  loved  to  spend  his 
days  among  the  sea-beasts  and  wrack  of  the  Inches  in 
the  Firth  of  Forth ;  and  it  was  through  the  instrument- 
ality of  his  *  brother  entomologists '  that  he  first  became 
acquainted  with  Henslow  himself  when  he  removed  to 
Cambridge.  The  good  professor  could  not  make  him 
into  a  naturalist :  inherited  tendencies  and  native  ener- 
gies had  done  that  for  him  already  from  his  very  cradle. 
'  Doctrina  sed  vim  promovet  insitam ; '  and  it  was 
well  that  Darwin  took  up  at  Cambridge  with  the  study 
of  geology  as  his  first  love.  For  geology  was  then  the 
living  and  moving  science,  as  astronomy  had  been  in 
the  sixteenth  century,  and  as  biology  is  at  the  present 
day — the  growing-point,  so  to  speak,  of  European  de- 
velopment, whence  all  great  things  might  naturally  be 
expected.  Moreover,  it  was  and  is  the  central  science 
of  the  concrete  class,  having  relations  with  astronomy 
on  the  one  hand,  and  with  biology  on  the  other ;  con- 
cerned alike  with  cosmical  chances  or  changes  on  this 
side,  and  with  the  minutest  facts  of  organic  nature  on 
that ;  the  meeting-place  and  border-land  of  all  the  sepa- 
rate branches  of  study  that  finally  bear  upon  the  com- 
plex problems  of  our  human  life.  No  other  subject  of 
investigation  was  so  well  calculated  to  rouse  Darwin's 
interest  in  the  ultimate  questions  of  evolution  or  creation, 


Early  Days  37 

of  sudden  cataclysm  or  gradual  growth,  of  miraculous 
intervention  or  slow  development.  Here,  if  anywhere, 
his  enigmas  were  all  clearly  propounded  to  him  by  the 
inarticulate  stony  sphinxes  ;  he  had  only  to  riddle  them 
out  for  himself  as  he  went  along  in  after  years  with  the 
aid  of  the  successive  side-lights  thrown  upon  the 
world  by  the  unconnected  lanterns  of  Lamarck  and  of 
Malthus. 

Fortunately  for  us,  then,  Darwin  did  not  waste  his 
time  at  Cambridge  over  the  vain  and  frivolous  pursuits 
of  the  classical  tripos.  He  preferred  to  work  at  his 
own  subjects  in  his  own  way,  and  to  leave  the  short- 
lived honours  of  the  schools  to  those  who  cared  for 
them  and  for  nothing  higher.  He  came  out  with  the 
ol  TToWoiin  1831,  and  thenceforth  proceeded  to  study 
life  in  the  wider  university  for  which  his  natural  incli- 
nations more  properly  fitted  him.  The  world  was  all 
before  him  where  to  choose,  and  he  chose  that  better 
part  which  shall  not  be  taken  away  from  him  as  long 
as  the  very  memory  of  science  survives. 


38  Charles  Darwin 


CHAPTER  IV. 
Darwin's  wander-years. 

Scarcely  had  Darwin  taken  his  pass  degree  at  Cam- 
bridge when  the  great  event  of  his  life  occurred  which, 
more  than  anything  else  perhaps,  gave  the  final  direction 
to  his  categorical  genius  in  the  line  it  was  thenceforth  so 
successfully  to  follow.  In  the  autumn  of  1831,  when 
Darwin  was  just  twenty-two,  it  was  decided  by  Govern- 
ment to  send  a  ten-gun  brig,  the '  Beagle,'  under  command 
of  Captain  Fitzroy,  to  complete  the  unfinished  survey  of 
Patagonia  and  Tierra  del  Fuego,  to  map  out  the  shores  of 
Chili  and  Peru,  to  visit  several  of  the  Pacific  archipelagoes, 
and  to  carry  a  chain  of  chronometrical  measurements 
round  the  whole  world.  This  was  an  essentially  scien- 
tific expedition,  and  Captain  Fitzroy,  afterwards  so 
famous  as  the  meteorological  admiral,  was  a  scientific 
oflicer  of  the  highest  type.  He  was  anxious  to  be 
accompanied  on  his  cruise  by  a  competent  naturalist 
who  would  undertake  the  collection  and  preservation  of 
the  animals  and  plants  discovered  on  the  voyage,  for 
which  purpose  he  generously  offered  to  give  up  a  share 
of  his  own  cabin  accommodation.  Professor  Henslow 
seized  upon  the  opportunity  to  recommend  for  the  post 
his  promising  pupil,  young  Darwin,  '  grandson  of  the 
poet.'     Darwin  gladly  volunteered  his  services  without 


Dar wins'  Wander-Years  39 

salary,  and  partly  paid  his  own  expenses  on  condition 
of  being  permitted  to  retain  in  his  own  possession  the 
animals  and  plants  he  collected  on  the  journey.  The 
*  Beagle '  set  sail  from  Devonport  on  December  the  27th, 
1831;  she  returned  to  Falmouth  on  October  the  2nd, 
1836, 

That  long  five  years'  cruise  around  the  world,  the 
journal  of  which  Darwin  has  left  us  in  the  *  Voyage  of 
the  "  Beagle," '  proved  a  marvellous  epoch  in  the  great 
naturalist's  quiet  career.  It  left  its  abiding  mark 
deeply  imprinted  on  all  his  subsequent  life  and  thinking. 
Lamarck  and  Erasmus  Darwin  were  cabinet  biologists,  - 
who  had  never  beheld  with  their  own  eyes  the  great 
round  world  and  all  that  therein  is ;  Charles  Darwin 
had  the  inestimable  privilege  of  seeing  for  himself,  at 
first  hand,  a  large  part  of  the  entire  globe  and  of  the 
creatures  that  inhabit  it.  Even  to  have  caught  one 
passing  glimpse  of  the  teeming  life  of  the  tropics  is  in 
itself  an  education ;  to  the  naturalist  it  is  more,  it  is  a 
revelation.  Our  starved  little  northern  fauna  and  flora, 
the  mere  leavings  of  the  vast  ice  sheets  that  spread 
across  our  zone  in  the  glacial  epoch,  show  us  a  world 
depopulated  of  all  its  largest,  strangest,  and  fiercest 
creatures ;  a  world  dwarfed  in  all  its  component  elements, 
and  immensely  differing  in  ten  thousand  ways  from 
that  rich,  luxuriant,  over-stocked  hot-house  in  which 
the  first  great  problems  of  evolution  were  practically 
worked  out  by  survival  of  the  fittest.  But  the  tropics 
preserve  for  us  still  in  all  their  jungles  something  of  the 
tangled,  thickly-peopled  aspect  which  our  planet  must 
have  presented  for  countless  ages  in  all  latitudes  before 
the   advent  of  primaeval   man.     We  now  know  that 


40  Charles  Darwin 

throughout  the  greater  part  of  geological  time,  essentially 
tropical  conditions  existed  unbroken  over  the  whole 
surface  of  the  entire  earth,  from  the  Antarctic  continent 
to  the  shores  of  Greenland ;  so  that  some  immediate 
acquaintance  at  least  with  the  equatorial  world  is  of 
immense  value  to  the  philosophical  naturalist  for  the 
sake  of  the  analogies  it  inevitably  suggests ;  and  it  is  a 
significant  fact  that  almost  all  those  great  and  fruitful 
thinkers  who  in  our  own  time  have  done  good  work  in 
the  wider  combination  of  biological  facts  have  themselves 
passed  a  considerable  number  of  years  in  investigating 
the  conditions  of  tropical  nature.  Europe  and  England 
are  at  the  ends  of  the  earth ;  the  tropics  are  biological 
head-quarters.  The  equatorial  zone  is  therefore  the 
true  school  for  the  historian  of  life  in  its  more  universal 
and  lasting  aspects. 

Nor  was  that  all.  The  particular  countries  visited 
by  the  '  Beagle '  during  the  course  of  her  long  and 
varied  cruise  happened  to  be  exactly  such  as  were 
naturally  best  adapted  for  bringing  out  the  latent  po- 
tentialities of  Darwin's  mind,  and  suggesting  to  his 
active  and  receptive  brain  those  deep  problems  of  life 
and  its  environment  which  he  afterwards  wrought  out 
with  such  subtle  skill  and  such  consummate  patience 
in  the  '  Origin  of  Species '  and  the  '  Descent  of  ]\Ian.' 
The  Cape  de  Verdes,  and  the  other  Atlantic  islands, 
with  their  scanty  population  of  plants  and  animals, 
composed  for  the  most  part  of  waifs  and  strays  drifted 
to  their  barren  rocks  by  ocean  currents,  or  blown  out 
helplessly  to  sea  by  heavy  winds ;  Brazil,  with  its 
marvellous  contrasting  wealth  of  tropical  luxuriance 
and  self-strangling  fertility,  a  new  province  of  inter- 


Darwin's  Wander-Years  41 

minable  delights  to  the  soul  of  the  enthusiastic  young 
collector;  the  South  American  pampas,  with  their 
colossal  remains  of  extinct  animals,  huge  geological 
precursors  of  the  stunted  modem  sloths  and  armadillos 
that  still  inhabit  the  self-same  plains ;  Tierra  del 
Fuego,  with  its  almost  Arctic  climate,  and  its  glimpses 
into  the  secrets  of  the  most  degraded  savage  types; 
the  vast  range  of  the  Andes  and  the  Cordilleras, 
with  their  volcanic  energy  and  their  closely  crowded 
horizontal  belts  of  climatic  life  ;  the  South  Sea  Islands, 
those  paradises  of  the  Pacific,  Hesperian  fables  true, 
alike  for  the  lover  of  the  picturesque  and  the  biological 
student ;  Australia,  that  surviving  fragment  of  an  ex- 
tinct world,  with  an  antiquated  fauna -whose  archaic 
character  still  closely  recalls  the  European  life  of  ten 
million  years  back  in  the  secondary  epoch :  all  these 
and  many  others  equally  novel  and  equally  instructive 
passed  in  long  alternating  panorama  before  Darwin's 
eyes,  and  left  their  images  deeply  photographed  for 
ever  after  on  the  lasting  tablets  of  his  retentive  memory. 
That  was  the  real  great  university  in  which  he  studied 
nature  and  read  for  his  degree.  Our  evolutionist  was 
now  being  educated. 

Throughout  the  whole  of  the  journal  of  this  long 
cruise,  which  Darwin  afterwards  published  in  an  en- 
larged form,  it  is  impossible  not  to  be  struck  at 
every  turn  with  the  way  in  which  his  inquisitive 
mind  again  and  again  recurs  to  the  prime  elements  of 
those  great  problems  towards  whose  solution  he  after- 
wards so  successfully  pointed  out  the  path.  The  Dar- 
winian ideas  are  all  already  there  in  the  germ ;  the 
embryo  form  of  the  '  Origin  of  Species '  plays  in  and 
5 


( 


42  Charles  Darwin 

out  on  every  page  with  tlie  quaintest  elusiveness.  We 
are  always  just  on  the  very  point  of  catching  it ;  and 
every  now  and  again  we  do  actually  all  but  catch  it  in 
essence  and  spirit,  though  ever  still  its  bodily  shape 
persistently  evades  us.  Questions  of  geographical  dis- 
tribution, of  geological  continuity,  of  the  influence  of 
climate,  of  the  modifiability  of  instinct,  of  the  effects 
of  surrounding  conditions,  absorb  the  young  observer's 
vivid  interest  at  every  step,  wherever  he  lands.  He  is 
all  unconsciously  collecting  notes  and  materials  in  pro- 
fuse abundance  for  his  great  work;  he  is  thinking  in 
rough  outline  the  new  thoughts  which  are  hereafter  to 
revolutionise  the  thought  of  humanity. 

Five  years  are  a  great  shoe  out  of  a  man's  life : 
those  five  years  of  ceaseless  wandering  by  sea  and  land 
were  spent  by  Charles  Darwin  in  accumulating  endless 
observations  and  hints  for  the  settlement  of  the  profound 
fundamental  problems  in  which  he  was  even  then  so 
deeply  interested.  The  '  Beagle '  sailed  from  England 
to  the  Cape  de  Verdes,  and  already,  even  before  she  had 
touched  her  first  land,  the  young  naturalist  had  observed 
'  with  interest  that  the  impalpably  fine  dust  which  fell  on 
deck  contained  no  less  than  sixty-seven  distinct  organic 
forms,  two  of  them  belonging  to  species  peculiar  to 
South  America.  In  some  of  the  dust  he  found  particles 
of  stone  so  very  big  that  they  measured  'above  the 
thousandth  of  an  inch  square ; '  and  after  this  fact,  says 
the  keen  student,  '  one  need  not  be  surprised  at  the 
diffusion  of  the  far  lighter  and  smaller  sporules  of  crypto- 
gamic  plants.'  Would  Erasmus  Darwin  have  noticed 
these  minute  points  and  their  implications  one  wonders  ? 
Probably  not.     May  we   not   see   in   the   observation 


Darwin's  Wander-Years  43  " 

partly  tlie  hereditary  tendencies  of  Josiah  Wedgwood 
towards  minute  investigation  and  accuracy  of  detail, 
partly  the  influence  of  the  scientific  time-wave,  and  the 
cai-eful  training  under  Professor  Henslow?  Erasmus 
Darwin  comes  before  us  rather  as  the  brilliant  and 
ingenious  amateur,  his  grandson  Charles  as  the  in- 
structed and  fully  equipped  final  product  of  the  scientific 
schools. 

At  St.  Paul's  Rocks,  once  more,  a  mass  of  new 
volcanic  peaks  rising  abruptly  from  the  midst  of  the 
Atlantic,  the  naturalist  of  the  '  Beagle '  notes  with 
interest  that  feather  and  dirt-feeding  and  parasitic 
insects  or  spiders  are  the  first  inhabitants  to  take  up 
their  quarters  on  recently  formed  oceanic  islands.  This 
problem  of  the  peopling  of  new  lands,  indeed,  so  closely 
connected  with  the  evolution  of  new  species,  necessarily 
obtruded  itself  upon  his  attention  again  and  again 
during  his  five  years'  cruise ;  and  in  some  cases,  espe- 
cially that  of  the  Galapagos  Islands,  the  curious  insular 
faunas  and  floras  which  he  observed  upon  this  trip, 
composed  as  they  were  of  mere  casual  strayhngs  from 
adjacent  shores,  produced  upon  his  mind  a  very  deep 
and  lasting  impression,  whose  traces  one  may  without 
difficulty  discern  on  every  second  page  of  the  '  Origin 
of  Species.' 

On  the  last  day  of  February,  1832,  the  'Beagle' 
came  to  anchor  in  the  harbour  of  Bahia,  and  young 
Darwin  caught  sight  for  the  first  time  of  the  mutually 
strangling  luxuriance  of  tropical  vegetation.  Nowhere 
on  earth  are  the  finest  conditions  of  tropical  life  more 
fully  realised  than  in  the  tangled  depths  of  the  great 
uncleared  Brazilian  forests,  which  everywhere  gird  round 


44  Charles  Darwin 

like  a  natural  palisade  with  tlieir  impenetrable  belt  the 
narrow  and  laborious  clearings  of  over-mastered  man. 
The  rich  alluvial  silt  of  mighty  river  systems,  the  im- 
memorial manuring  of  the  virgin  soil,  the  fierce  energy 
of  an  almost  equatorial  sun,  and  the  universal  presence 
of  abundant  water,  combine  to  make  life  in  that  mar- 
vellous region  unusually  wealthy,  varied,  and  crowded, 
so  that  the  struggle  for  existence  is  there  perhaps  more 
directly  visible  to  the  seeing  eye  than  in  any  other 
known  portion  of  God's  universe.  *  Delight  itself,'  says 
Darwin  in  his  journal,  with  that  naive  simplicity  which 
everywhere  forms  the  chief  charm  of  his  direct  and  un- 
afiected  literary  style — '  delight  itself  is  a  weak  term  to 
express  the  feelings  of  a  naturalist  who  for  the  first 
time  has  wandered  by  himself  in  a  Brazilian  forest. 
The  elegance  of  the  grasses,  the  novelty  of  the  para- 
sitical plants,  the  beauty  of  the  flowers,  the  glossy  green 
of  the  foliage,  but  above  all  the  general  luxuriance  of 
the  vegetation,  filled  me  with  admiration.'  In  truth, 
among  those  huge  buttressed  trunks,  overhung  by  the 
unbroken  canopy  of  foliage  on  the  vast  spreading  and 
interlacing  branches,  festooned  with  lianas  and  drooping 
lichens,  or  beautified  by  the  pendent  alien  growth  of 
perfumed  orchids,  Darwin's  mind  must  indeed  have 
found  congenial  food  for  apt  reflection,  and  infinite 
opportunities  for  inference  and  induction.  From  the 
mere  picturesque  point  of  view,  indeed,  the  naturalist 
enjoys  such  sights  as  this  a  thousand  times  more  truly 
and  profoundly  than  the  mere  casual  unskilled  observer : 
for  it  is  a  shallow,  self-flattering  mistake  of  vulgar  and 
narrow  minds  to  suppose  that  fuller  knowledge  and 
clearer   insight   can   destroy  or  impair  the  beauty  of 


Darwin^ s  Wander-Years  45 

beautiful  objects — as  wlio  should  imagine  that  a  great 
painter  appreciates  the  sunset  less  than  a  silly  boy  or 
a  sentimental  schoolgirl.  As  a  matter  of  fact,  the 
naturalist  knows  and  admires  a  thousand  exquisite 
points  of  detail  in  every  flower  and  every  insect  which 
only  he  himself  and  the  true  artist  can  equally  delight 
in.  And  a  keen  intellectual  and  aesthetic  joy  in  the 
glorious  fecundity  and  loveliness  of  nature  was  every- 
where present  to  Darwin's  mind.  But,  beyond  and 
above  even  that,  there  was  also  the  architectonic  delight 
of  the  great  organiser  in  the  presence  of  a  noble  organised 
product :  the  peculiar  pleasure  felt  only  by  the  man  in 
whose  broader  soul  all  minor  details  fall  at  once  into 
their  proper  place,  as  component  elements  in  one  great 
consistent  and  harmonious  whole — a  sympathetic  plea- 
sure akin  to  that  with  which  an  architect  views  the 
interior  of  Ely  and  of  Lincoln,  or  a  musician  listens  to 
the  linked  harmonies  of  the  '  Messiah '  and  the  '  Crea- 
tion.' The  scheme  of  nature  was  now  unfolding  itself 
visibly  and  clearly  before  Charles  Darwin's  very  eyes.  , 
After  eighteen  memorable  days  spent  with  unceasing 
delight  at  Bahia,  the  '  Beagle '  sailed  again  for  Rio,  where 
Darwin  stopped  for  three  months,  to  improve  his  ac- 
quaintance with  the  extraordinary  wealth  of  the  South 
American  fauna  and  flora.  Collecting  insects  was  here 
his  chief  occupation,  and  it  is  interesting  to  note  even 
at  this  early  period  how  his  attention  was  attracted  by 
some  of  those  strange  alluring  devices  on  the  part  of 
the  males  for  charming  their  partners  which  afterwards 
formed  the  principal  basis  for  his  admirable  theory  of 
sexual  selection,  so  fuUy  developed  in  the  '  Descent  of 
Man.'     '  Several   times,'   he   says,    '  when   a  pair   [of 


46,  Charles  Darwin 

butterflies],  probably  male  and  female,  were  chasing 
each  other  in  an  irregular  course,  they  passed  within  a 
few  yards  of  me ;  and  I  distinctly  heard  a  clicking 
noise,  similar  to  that  produced  by  a  toothed  wheel  pass- 
ing under  a  spring  catch.'  In  like  manner  he  observed 
here  the  instincts  of  tropical  ants,  the  habits  of  phos- 
phorescent insects,  and  the  horrid  practice  of  that  wasp- 
like creature,  the  sphex,  which  stuffs  the  clay  cells  of 
its  larvae  full  of  half-dead  spiders  and  writhing  cater- 
pillars, so  stung  with  devilish  avoidance  of  vital  parts 
as  to  be  left  quite  paralysed  yet  still  alive,  as  future 
food  for  the  developing  grubs.  Cases  like  these  helped 
naturally  to  shake  the  young  biologist's  primitive  faith 
in  the  cheap  and  crude  current  theories  of  universal 
beneficence,  and  to  introduce  that  wholesome  sceptical 
reaction  against  received  dogma  which  is  the  necessary 
ground-work  and  due  preparation  for  all  great  progres- 
sive philosophical  thinking. 

In  July  they  set  sail  again  for  Monte  Video,  where 
the  important  question  of  climate  and  vegetation  began 
to  interest  young  Darwin's  mind.  Uruguay  is  almost 
entirely  treeless;  and  this  curious  phenomenon,  in  a 
comparatively  moist  sub-tropical  plain-land,  struck  him 
as  a  remarkable  anomaly,  and  set  him  speculating  on  its 
probable  cause.  Australia,  he  remembered,  was  far 
more  arid,  and  yet  its  interior  was  everywhere  covered 
by  whole  forests  of  quaint  indigenous  gum-trees.  Could 
it  be  that  there  were  no  trees  adapted  to  the  climate  ? 
As  yet,  the  true  causes  of  geographical  distribution  had 
not  clearly  dawned  upon  Darwin's  mind ;  but  that  a 
young  man  of  twenty-three  should  seriously  busy  him- 
self about  such  problems  of  ultimate  causation  at  all  is 


Darwin's  Wander-Years  47 

in  itself  a  sufficiently  pointed  and  remarkable  phe- 
nomenon. It  was  here,  too,  that  he  first  saw  that 
curious  animal,  the  Tucutuco,  a  true  rodent  with  the 
habits  of  a  mole,  which  is  almost  always  found  in  a 
blind  condition.  With  reference  to  this  singular 
creature,  there  occurs  in  his  journal  one  of  those  inter- 
esting anticipatory  passages  which  show  the  rough 
workings  of  the  distinctive  evolutionary  Darwinian 
concept  in  its  earlier  stages.  *  Considering  the  strictly 
subterranean  habits  of  the  Tucutuco,'  he  writes,  'the 
blindness,  though  so  common,  cannot  be  a  very  serious 
evil;  yet  it  appears  strange  that  any  animal  should 
possess  an  organ  frequently  subject  to  be  injured. 
Lamarck  would  have  been  delighted  with  this  fact,  had 
he  known  it,  when  speculating  (probably  with  more 
truth  than  usual  with  him)  on  the  gradually  acquired 
blindness  of  the  Aspalax,  a  gnawer  living  under  the 
ground,  and  of  the  Proteus,  a  reptile  living  in  dark 
caverns  fiUed  with  water  ;  in  both  of  which  animals  the 
eye  is  in  an  almost  rudimentary  state,  and  is  covered  by 
a  tendinous  membrane  and  skin.  In  the  common  mole 
the  eye  is  extraordinarily  small  but  perfect,  though 
many  anatomists  doubt  whether  it  is  connected  with 
the  true  optic  nerve ;  its  vision  must  certainly  be  im- 
perfect, though  probably  useful  to  the  animal  when  it 
leaves  its  burrow.  In  the  Tucutuco,  which  I  believe 
never  comes  to  the  surface  of  the  ground,  the  eye  is 
rather  larger,  but  often  rendered  blind  and  useless, 
though  without  apparently  causing  any  inconvenience  to 
the  animal :  no  doubt  Lamarck  would  have  said  that  the 
Tucutuco  is  now  passing  into  the  state  of  the  Aspalax 
and  Proteus.'     The  passage  is  instructive  both  as  show- 


48  Charles  Darwin 

ing  that  Danvin  was  already  familiar  with  Lamarck's 
writings,  and  as  pointing  out  the  natural  course  of  his 
own  future  development. 

For  the  two  years  from  her  arrival  at  Monte  Video, 
the  '  Beagle '  was  employed  in  sun^eying  the  eastern 
coast  of  South  America ;  and  Darwin  enjoyed  unusual 
opportunities  for  studying  the  geology,  the  zoology,  and 
the  botany  of  the  surrounding  districts  during  all 
that  period.  It  was  a  suggestive  field  indeed  for  the 
young  naturalist.  The  curious  relationship  of  the 
gigantic  fossil  armour-plated  animals  to  the  existing 
armadillo,  of  the  huge  megatherium  to  the  modem 
sloths,  and  of  the  colossal  ant-eaters  to  their  degenerate 
descendants  at  the  present  day,  formed  one  of  the  direct 
inciting  causes  to  the  special  study  which  produced  at 
last  the  '  Origin  of  Species.'  In  the  Introduction  to 
that  immortal  work  Darwin  wrote,  some  twenty-seven 
years  later,  '  When  on  board  H.M.S.  "  Beagle  "  as  natu- 
ralist, I  was  much  struck  with  certain. facts  in  the  dis- 
tribution of  the  organic  beings  inhabiting  South  Ame- 
rica, and  in  the  geological  relations  of  the  present  to  the 
past  inhabitants  of  that  continent.  These  facts,  as  will 
be  seen  in  the  latter  chapters  of  this  volume,  seemed  to 
throw  some  light  on  the  origin  of  species — that  mystery 
of  mysteries,  as  it  has  been  called  by  one  of  our  greatest 
philosophers.'  And  in  the  body  of  the  work  itself  he 
refers  over  and  over  again  to  numberless  observations 
made  by  himself  during  this  period  of  rapid  psycho- 
logical development — observations  on  the  absence  of 
recent  geological  formations  along  the  lately  upheaved 
South  American  coast ;  on  the  strange  extinction  of  the 
horse  in  La  Plata ;  on  the  aflSnities  of  the  extinct  and 


Darwin's  Wander-Years  49 

recent  species;  on  the  effect  of  minute  individual 
peculiarities  in  preserving  life  under  special  circum- 
stances ;  and  on  the  influence  of  insects  and  blood-suck- 
ing bats  in  determining  the  existence  of  the  larger 
naturalised  mammals  in  parts  of  Brazil  and  the 
Argentine  Republic.  It  was  the  epoch  of  wide  collec- 
tion of  facts,  to  be  afterwards  employed  in  brilliant 
generalisations :  the  materials  for  the  '  Origin  of  Species ' 
were  being  slowly  accumulated  in  the  numberless 
pigeon-holes  of  the  Darwinian  memory. 

Among  the  facts  thus  industriously  gathered  by 
Darwin  in  the  two  years  spent  on  the  South  American 
coast  were  several  curious  instincts  of  the  cuckoo-like 
molothrus,  of  the  owl  of  the  Pampas,  and  of  the 
American  ostrich.  A  few  sentences  scattered  here  and 
there  through  this  part  of  the  '  Naturalist's  Journal ' 
may  well  be  extracted  in  the  present  place  as  showing, 
better  than  any  mere  secondhand  description  could  do, 
the  slow  germinating  process  of  the  '  Origin  of  Species.' 
In  speaking  of  the  toxodon,  that  strange  extinct  South 
American  mammal,  the  young  author  remarks  acutely 
that,  though  in  size  it  equalled  the  elephant  and  the 
megatherium,  the  structure  of  its  teeth  shows  it  to  be 
closely  allied  to  the  ruminants,  while  several  other 
details  link  it  to  the  pachyderms,  and  its  aquatic 
peculiarities  of  ear  and  nostril  approximate  it  rather 
to  the  manatee  and  the  dugong.  'How  wonder- 
fully,' he  says,  '  are  the  different  orders,  at  the  present 
time  so  well  separated,  blended  together  in  different 
points  of  the  structure  of  the  toxodon.'  We  now 
know  that  unspecialised  ancestral  forms  always  display 
this  close  union  of  peculiarities  afterwards  separately 


50  Charles  Darwin 

developed  in  distinct  species   of  their  later  descend- 
ants. 

Still  more  pregnant  with  evolutionism  in  the  bud  is 
the  prophetic  remark  about  a  certain  singular  group  of 
South  American  birds, '  This  small  family  is  one  of  those 
which,  from  its  varied  relations  to  other  families, 
although  at  present  offering  only  difficulties  to  the 
systematic  naturalist,  ultimately  may  assist  in  revealing 
the  grand  scheme,  common  to  the  present  and  past  ages, 
on  which  organised  beings  have  been  created.'  Of  the 
agouti,  once  more,  that  true  friend  of  the  desert, 
Darwin  notes  that  it  does  not  now  range  as  far  south  as 
Port  St.  Julian,  though  Wood  in  1670  found  it  abundant 
there ;  and  he  asks  suggestively, '  What  cause  can  have 
altered,  in  a  wide,  uninhabited,  and  rarely  visited 
country,  the  range  of  an  animal  like  this  ? '  Again, 
when  speaking  of  the  analogies  between  the  extinct 
camel-like  macrauchenia  and  the  modern  guanaco,  as 
well  as  of  those  between  the  fossil  and  living  species  of 
South  American  rodents,  he  says,  with  even  more  pro- 
phetic insight,  '  This  wonderful  relationship  in  the  same 
continent  between  the  dead  and  the  living  will,  I  do 
not  doubt,  hereafter  throw  more  light  on  the  appearance 
of  organic  beings  on  our  earth,  and  their  disappearance 
from  it,  than  any  other  class  of  facts.'  He  was  him- 
self destined  in  another  thirty  years  to  prove  the  truth 
of  his  own  vaticination. 

A  yet  more  remarkable  passage  in  the  '  Journal  of 
the  "  Beagle," '  though  entered  under  the  account  of 
events  observed  in  the  year  1834,  must  almost  certainly 
have  been  written  somewhat  later,  and  subsequently  to 
Darwin's  first  reading  of  Malthus's  momentous  work, 


Darwin's  Wander-Years  51 

'The  Principle  of  Population,'  whicli  (as  we  know 
from  his  own  pen)  formed  a  cardinal  point  in  the  great 
biologist's  mental  development.  It  runs  as  follows  in 
the  published  journal : ' — '  We  do  not  steadily  bear  in 
mind  how  profoundly  ignorant  we  are  of  the  condi- 
tions of  existence  of  every  animal ;  nor  do  we  always 
remember  that  some  check  is  constantly  preventing  tho 
too  rapid  increase  of  every  organised  being  left  in  a 
state  of  nature.  The  supply  of  food,  on  an  average, 
remains  constant ;  yet  the  tendency  in  every  animal  to 
increase  by  propagation  is  geometrical,  and  its  sur- 
prising effects  have  nowhere  been  more  astonishingly 
shown  than  in  the  case  of  the  European  animals  run 
wild  during  the  last  few  centuries  in  America.  Every 
animal  in  a  state  of  nature  regularly  breeds ;  yet  in  a 
species  long  established  any  great  increase  in  numbers 
is  obviously  impossible,  and  must  be  checked  by  some 
means.'  Aut  Malthus  aut  Diabolus.  And  surely  here, 
if  anywhere  at  all,  we  tremble  on  the  very  verge  of 
natural  selection. 

It  would  be  impossible  to  follow  young  Darwin  in 
detail  through  his  journey  to  Buenos  Ayres,  and  up  the 
Parana  to  Santa  Fe,  which  occupied  the  autumn  of  1833. 
In  the  succeeding  year  he  visited  Patagonia  and  the 
Falkland  Islands,  having  previously  made  his  first  ac- 
quaintance with  savage  life  among  the  naked  Fue- 
gians  of  the  extreme  southern  point  of  the  continent. 
Some  of  these  interesting  natives,  taken  to  England  by 

•  The  full  narrative  was  first  given  to  the  world  in  1839,  some 
three  years  after  Darwin's  return  to  England,  so  that  much  of  it 
evidently  represents  the  results  of  his  maturer  thinking  and  reading 
on  the  facts  collected  during  his  journey  round  the  world. 


52  Charles  Darwin 

Captain  Fitzroy  on  a  former  visit,  had  accompanied  the 
'  Beagle '  through  all  her  wanderings,  and  from  them 
Darwin  obtained  that  close  insight  into  the  workings  of 
savage  human  nature  which  he  afterwards  utilised  with 
such  conspicuous  ability  in  the  '  Descent  of  Man.' 
Through  Magellan's  Straits  the  party  made  their  way 
up  the  coasts  of  Chili,  and  Darwin  had  there  an  oppor- 
tunity of  investigating  the  geology  and  biology  of  the 
Cordillera.  The  year  1835  was  chiefly  spent  in  that 
temperate  country  and  in  tropical  Peru  ;  and  as  the 
autumn  went  on,  the  '  Beagle '  made  her  way  across  a 
belt  of  the  Pacific  to  the  Galapagos  archipelago. 

Small  and  unimportant  as  are  those  little  equatorial 
islands  from  the  geographical  and  commercial  point  of 
view,  they  will  yet  remain  for  ever  classic  ground  to  the 
biologists  of  the  future  from  their  close  connection  with 
the  master-problems  of  the  '  Origin  of  Species.'  Here 
more,  perhaps,  than  anywhere  else  the  naturalist  of  the 
'  Beagle '  found  himself  face  to  face  in  real  earnest  with 
the  ultimate  questions  of  creation  or  evolution.  A 
group  of  tiny  volcanic  islets,  never  joined  to  any  land, 
nor  even  united  to  one  another,  yet  each  possessing  its 
own  special  zoological  features — the  Galapagos  roused 
to  anf  extraordinary  degree  the  irresistible  questionings 
of  Darwin's  mind.  They  contain  no  frogs,  and  no 
mammal  save  a  mouse,  brought  to  them,  no  doubt,  by 
some  passing  ship.  The  only  insects  are  beetles,  which 
possess  peculiar  facilities  for  being  transported  in  the 
6gg  or  grub  across  salt  water  upon  floating  logs.  There 
are  two  kinds  of  snake,  one  tortoise,  and  four  lizards  j 
but,  in  striking  contrast  to  this  extreme  poverty  of 
terrestrial  forms,  there  are   at   least  fifty-five  distinct 


Darwin's  Wander-Years  53 

species  of  native  birds.  A  few  snails  complete  the  list. 
Now  most  of  these  animals,  though  closely  resembling 
the  fauna  of  Ecuador,  the  nearest  mainland,  are 
specifically  distinct ;  they  have  varied  (as  we  now  know) 
from  their  continental  types  owing  to  natural  selection 
under  the  new  circumstances  in  which  they  have  been 
placed.  But  Darwin  had  not  yet  evolved  that  potent 
key  to  the  great  riddle  of  organic  existence.  He  saw 
the  problem,  but  not  its  solution.  *  Most  of  the  organic 
productions,'  he  says  plainly,  '  are  aboriginal  creations, 
found  nowhere  else ;  there  is  even  a  difference  between 
the  inhabitants  of  the  different  islands  :  yet  all  show  a 
marked  relationship  with  those  of  America,  though 
separated  from  that  continent  by  an  open  space  of  ocean, 
between  500  and  600  miles  in  width.  .  .  .  Considering 
the  small  size  of  these  islands,  we  feel  the  more 
astonished  at  the  number  of  their  aboriginal  beings, 
and  at  their  confined  range.  Seeing  every  height 
crowned  with  its  crater,  and  the  boundaries  of  most  of 
the  lava-streams  still  distinct,  we  are  led  to  believe  that 
within  a  period  geologically  recent  the  nnbroken  sea  was 
here  spread  out.  Hence,  both  in  space  and  time  we 
seem  to  be  brought  somewhat  nearer  to  that  great  fact — 
that  mystery  of  mysteries — the  first  appearance  of  new 
beings  on  this  earth,'  Among  the  most  singular  of 
these  zoological  facts  may  be  mentioned  the  existence 
in  the  Galapagos  archipelago  of  a  genus  of  gigantic  and 
ngly  lizard,  the  amblyrhyncus,  unknown  elsewhere,  but 
here  assuming  the  forms  of  two  species,  the  one  marine 
and  the  other  terrestrial.  In  minuter  points,  the  dif- 
ferences of  fauna  and  flora  between  the  various  islands 
are  simply  astounding,  so  as  to  compel  the  idea  that 
6 


54  Charles  Darwin 

each  form  must  necessarily  have  been  developed  not 
merely  for  the  group,  but  for  the  special  island  which  it 
actually  inhabits.  No  wonder  that  Darwin  should  say 
in  conclusion,  '  One  is  astonished  at  the  amount  of 
creative  force,  if  such  an  expression  may  be  used,  dis- 
played on  these  small,  barren,  and  rocky  islands ;  and 
still  more  so  at  its  diverse,  yet  analogous,  action  on 
points  so  near  each  other.'  Here  again,  in  real  earnest, 
the  young  observer  trembles  visibly  on  the  very  verge 
of  natural  selection.  In  the  'Origin  of  Species'  he 
makes  full  use,  more  than  once,  of  the  remarkable  facts 
he  observed  with  so  much  interest  in  these  tiny  isolated 
oceanic  specks  of  the  American  galaxy. 

From  the  Galapagos  the  '  Beagle '  steered  a  straight 
course  for  Tahiti,  and  Darwin  then  beheld  with  his  own 
eyes  the  exquisite  beauty  of  the  Polynesian  Islands. 
Thence  they  sailed  for  New  Zealand,  the  most  truly 
insular  large  mass  of  land  in  the  whole  world,  supplied 
accordingly  with  a  fauna  and  flora  of  most  surprising 
meagreness  and  poverty  of  species.  In  the  woods,  our 
observer  noted  very  few  birds,  and  he  remarks  with 
astonishment  that  so  big  an  island — as  large  as  Great 
Britain — should  not  possess  a  single  living  indigenous 
mammal,  save  a  solitary  rat  of  doubtful  origin.  Australia 
and  Tasmania,  with  their  antiquated  and  stranded  mar- 
supial inhabitants,  almost  completed  the  round  trip. 
Keeling  Island  next  afibrded  a  basis  for  the  future 
famous  observations  upon  coral  reefs;  and  thence  by 
Mauritius,  St.  Helena,  Ascension,  Bahia,  Pernambuco, 
and  the  beautiful  Azores,  the  '  Beagle '  made  her  way 
home  by  slow  stages  to  England,  which  she  reached  in 
safety  on  October  the  2nd,  1836.  What  an  ideal  education 


Darwin's  Wander-Years  55 

for  the  future  reconstructor  of  biological  science !  He 
had  now  all  his  problems  cut  and  dried,  ready  to  his 
hand,  and  he  had  nothing  important  left  to  do — except 
to  sit  down  quietly  in  his  study,  and  proceed  to  solve 
them.  Observation  and  collection  had  given  him  one 
half  the  subject-matter  of  the  '  Origin  of  Species ; ' 
reflection  and  ]\falthus  were  to  give  him  the  other  half. 
Never  had  great  mind  a  nobler  chance ;  never,  again, 
had  noble  chance  a  great  mind  better  adapted  by  nature 
and  heredity  to  make  the  most  of  it.  The  man  was 
not  wanting  to  the  opportunity,  nor  was  the  opportunity 
wanting  to  the  man.  Organism  and  environment  fell 
together  into  perfect  harmony ;  and  so,  by  a  lucky  com- 
bination of  circumstances,  the  secret  of  the  ages  was 
finally  wrung  from  not  unwilling  nature  by  the  far- 
seeing  and  industrious  volunteer  naturalist  of  the 
*  Beagle '  expedition. 

It  would  be  giving  a  very  false  idea  of  the  interests 
which  stirred  Charles  Darwin's  mind  during  his  long 
five  years'  voyage,  however,  if  we  were  to  dwell  ex- 
clusively upon  the  biological  side  of  his  numerous 
observations  on  that  memorable  cruise.  Ethnology, 
geology,  oceanic  phenomena,  the  height  of  the  snow- 
line, the  climate  of  the  Antarctic  islands,  the  formation 
of  icebergs,  the  transport  of  boulders,  the  habits  and 
manners  engendered  by  slavery,  all  almost  equally 
aroused  in  their  own  way  the  young  naturalist's  vivid 
interest.  Nowhere  do  we  get  the  faintest  trace  of 
narrow  specialism ;  nowhere  are  we  cramped  within 
the  restricted  horizon  of  the  mere  vulgar  beetle-hunter 
and  butterfly-catcher.  The  biologist  of  the  '  Beagle ' 
had  taken  the  whole  world  of  science  for  his  special 


56  Charles  Darwin 

province.  Darwin's  mind  with  all  its  vastness  was  not, 
indeed,  profoundly  analytical.  The  task  of  working 
out  the  psychological  and  metaphysical  aspects  of 
evolution  fell  rather  to  the  great  organising  and  sys- 
tematising  intellect  of  Herbert  Spencer.  But  within 
the  realm  of  material  fact,  and  of  the  widest  possible 
inferences  based  upon  such  fact,  Darwin's  keen  and 
comprehensive  spirit  ranged  freely  over  the  whole 
illimitable  field  of  nature.  *  No  one,'  says  Buckle 
with  unwonted  felicity,  '  can  have  a  firm  grasp  of  any 
science  if,  by  confining  himself  to  it,  he  shuts  out  the 
light  of  analogy.  He  may,  no  doubt,  wprk  at  the 
details  of  his  subject ;  he  may  be  useful  in  adding  to 
its  facts ;  he  will  never  be  able  to  enlarge  its  philosophy. 
For  the  philosophy  of  every  department  depends  on  its 
connection  with  other  departments,  and  must  therefore 
be  sought  at  their  points  of  contact.  It  must  be  looked 
for  in  the  place  where  they  touch  and  coalesce  :  it  lies, 
not  in  the  centre  of  each  science,  but  on  the  confines 
and  margin.'  This  profound  truth  Darwin  fully  and 
instinctively  realised.  It  was  the  all-embracing  catho- 
licity of  his  manifold  interests  that  raised  him  into  the 
greatest  pure  biologist  of  all  time,  and  that  enabled 
him  to  co-ordinate  with  such  splendid  results  the  raw 
data  of  so  many  distinct  and  separate  sciences.  And 
even  as  early  as  the  days  of  the  cruise  in  the  '  Beagle,' 
that  innate  catholicity  had  already  asserted  itself  in 
full  vigour.  Now  it  is  a  party  of  Gauchos  throwing 
the  bola  that  engages  for  the  moment  his  eager  atten- 
tion ;  and  now  again  it  is  a  group  of  shivering  Fuegians, 
standing  naked  with  their  long  hair  streaming  in  the 
wind   on  a  snowy  promontory  of  their  barren  coast. 


Darwin's  Wander-Years  57 

Here  lie  examines  the  tubular  lightning-holes  melted  in 
the  solid  rock  of  Maldonado  by  the  electric  energy; 
and  there  he  observes  the  moving  boulder-streams  that 
course  like  torrents  down  the  rugfofed  corries  of  the 
Falkland  Islands.  At  one  time  he  works  upon  the 
unstudied  geology  of  the  South  American  Pampas ;  at 
another,  he  inspects  the  now  classical  lagoon  and  nar- 
row fringing  reef  of  the  Keeling  archipelago.  Every- 
where he  sees  whatever  of  most  noteworthy  in  animate 
or  inanimate  nature  is  there  to  be  seen ;  and  every- 
where he  draws  from  it  innumerable  lessons,  to  be 
applied  hereafter  to  the  special  field  of  study  upon 
which  his'  intense  and  active  energies  were  finally 
concentrated.  It  is  not  too  much  to  say,  indeed,  that 
it  was  the  voyage  of  the  '  Beagle  '  which  gave  us  in  the 
last  resort  the  '  Origin  of  Species '  and  its  great  fellow 
the  '  Descent  of  Man.' 


5 8  Charles  Darwin 


CHAPTER  V. 

THE  PERIOD   OF  INCUBATION. 

When  Charles  Darwin  landed  in  England  on  his  return 
from  the  voyage  of  the '  Beagle  '  he  was  nearly  twenty- 
eight.  When  he  published  the  first  edition  of  the 
<  Origin  of  Species '  he  was  over  fifty.  The  intermediate 
years,  though  much  occupied  by  many  minor  works  of 
deep  specialist  scientific  importance,  were  still  mainly 
devoted  to  collecting  material  for  the  one  crowning 
effort  of  his  life,  the  chief  monument  of  his  great  co- 
ordinating and  commanding  intellect — the  settlement 
of  the  question  of  organic  evolution. 

*  There  is  one  thing,'  says  Professor  Fiske,  *  which 
a  man  of  original  scientific  or  philosophical  genius  in 
a  rightly  ordered  world  should  never  be  called  upon  to 
do.  He  should  never  be  called  upon  to  earn  a  living ; 
for  that  is  a  wretched  waste  of  energy,  in  which  the 
highest  intellectual  power  is  sure  to  suffer  serious 
detriment,  and  runs  the  risk  of  being  frittered  away 
into  hopeless  ruin.'  From  this  unhappy  necessity 
Charles  Darwin,  like  his  predecessor  Lyell,  was  luckily 
free.  He  settled  down  early  in  a  home  of  his  own, 
and  worked  away  at  his  own  occupations,  with  no 
sordid   need   for   earning   the   day's   bread,   but   with 


The  Period  of  Incubation  59 

perfect  leisure  to  carry  out  the  great  destiny  for  which 
the  chances  of  the  universe  had  singled  him  out.  His 
subsequent  history  is  the  history  of  his  wonderful  and 
unique  contributions  to  natural  science. 

The  first  thing  to  be  done,  of  course,  was  the  ar- 
rangement and  classification  of  the  natural  history  spoils 
gathered  during  the  cruise,  and  the  preparation  of  his 
own  journal  of  the  voyage  for  publication.  The  strict 
scientific  results  of  the  trip  were  described  in  the 
'  Zoology  of  the  Voyage  of  the  "  Beagle,"  '  the  different 
parts  of  which  were  undertaken  by  rising  men  of 
science  of  the  highest  distinction,  under  Charles 
Darwin's  own  editorship.  Sir  Richard  Owen  took  in 
hand  the  fossil  mammals ;  Waterhouse  arranged  their 
living  allies  ;  Gould  discussed  the  birds,  Jenyns  the 
fish,  and  Bell  the  amphibians  and  reptiles.  In  this 
vast  co-operative  publication  Darwin  thus  obtained 
the  assistance  of  many  among  the  most  competent 
specialists  in  the  England  of  his  day,  and  learned  to 
understand  his  own  collections  by  the  light  thrown 
upon  them  from  the  focussed  lamps  of  the  most  minute 
technical  learning.  As  for  the  journal,  it  was  origi- 
nally published  with  the  general  account  of  the  cruise 
by  Captain  Fitzroy  in  1839,  but  was  afterwards  set 
forth  in  a  separate  form  under  the  title  of  '  A  Natural- 
ist's Voyage  Round  the  World.' 

But  while  Darwin  was  thus  enfyaofed  in  arrangrinsr 
and  classifying  the  animals  and  plants  he  had  brought 
home  with  him,  the  germs  of  those  inquiring  ideas  about 
the  origin  of  species  which  we  have  already  observed 
in  his  account  of  the  voyage  were  quickening  into  fresh 
life  within  him.      As  he  ruminated  at  his  leisure  over 


6o  Charles  Darwin 

the  results  of  his  accumulations,  he  was  beginning 
to  work  upon  the  great  problem  with  the  definite  and 
conscious  resolution  of  solving  it.  '  On  my  return 
home,  it  occurred  to  me,'  he  says,  '  in  1837,  that  some- 
thing might  perhaps  be  made  out  on  this  question  by 
patiently  accumulating  and  reflecting  on  all  sorts  of 
facts  which  could  possibly  have  any  bearing  on  it. 
After  five  years'  work,  I  allowed  myself  to  speculate  on 
the  subject,  and  drew  up  some  short  notes ;  these  I  en- 
larged in  1844  into  a  sketch  of  the  conclusions  that 
then  seemed  to  me  probable ;  from  that  period  to  the 
present  day  [1859]  I  have  steadily  pursued  the  same 
object.  I  hope  that  T  may  be  excused  for  entering  on 
these  personal  details,  as  I  give  them  to  show  that  I 
have  not  been  hasty  in  coming  to  a  decision,' 

So  Darwin  wrote  at  fifty.  The  words  are  weighty 
and  well  worthy  of  consideration.  They  give  us  in  a 
nutshell  the  true  secret  of  Darwin's  success  in  compel- 
ling the  attention  and  assent  of  his  contemporaries  to 
his  completed  theory.  For  speculations  and  hypotheses 
like  those  of  Lamarck  and  Erasmus  Darwin,  however 
brilliant  and  luminous  they  may  be,  the  hard,  dry, 
scientific  mind  cares  as  a  rule  less  than  nothing.  Men 
of  genius  and  insight  like  Goethe  and  Oken  may, 
indeed,  seize  greedily  upon  the  pregnant  suggestion; 
their  intellects  are  already  attuned  by  nature  to  its  due 
reception  and  assimilation;  but  the  mere  butterfly- 
catchers  and  plant-hunters  of  the  world,  with  whom 
after  all  rests  ultimately  the  practical  acceptance  or 
rejection  of  such  a  theory,  can  only  be  convinced  by 
long  and  patient  accumulations  of  facts,  by  infinite 
instances  and  endless  examples,  by  exhaustive  surveys 


The  Period  of  Incubation  6i 

of  tlie  whole  field  of  nature  in  a  thousand  petty  details 
piecemeal.  Thej  have  to  be  driven  by  repeated  beating 
into  the  right  path.  Everywhere  they  fancy  they  see 
the  loophole  of  an  objection,  which  must  be  carefully 
closed  beforehand  against  them  with  anticipatory 
argument,  as  we  close  hedges  by  the  wayside  against 
the  obtrusive  donkey  with  a  cautious  bunch  of 
thorny  brambles.  Even  if  Charles  Darwin  had  hit 
upon  the  fundamental  idea  of  natural  selection,  and 
had  published  it,  as  Wallace  did,  in  the  form  of  a  mere 
splendid  apergu,  he  would  never  have  revolutionised 
the  world  of  biology.  When  the  great  discovery  was 
actually  promulgated,  it  was  easy  enough  to  win  the 
assent  of  philosophical  thinkers  like  Herbert  Spencer ; 
easy  enough,  even,  to  gain  the  ready  adhesion  of  non- 
biological  but  kindred  minds,  like  Leslie  Stephen's  and 
John  Morley's;  those  might  all,  perhaps,  have  been 
readily  convinced  by  far  less  heavy  and  crushing  artillery 
than  that  so  triumphantly  marshalled  together  in  the 
*  Origin  of  Species.'  But  in  order  to  command  the  slow 
and  grudging  adhesion  of  the  rank  and  file  of  scientific 
workers,  the  *  hodmen  of  science,'  as  Professor  Huxley 
calls  them,  it  was  needful  to  bring  together  an  imposing 
array  of  closely  serried  facts,  to  secure  every  post  in 
the  rear  before  taking  a  single  step  onward,  and  to 
bring  to  bear  upon  every  antagonist  the  exact  form  of 
argument  with  which  he  was  already  thoroughly  famihar. 
It  was  by  carefully  pursuing  these  safe  and  cautious  phi- 
losophical tactics  that  Charles  Darwin  gained  his  great 
victory.  Where  others  were  pregnant,  he  was  cogent. 
He  met  the  Dryasdusts  of  science  on  their  own  ground, 
and  he  put  them  fairly  to  flight  with  their  own  weapons. 


62  Charles  Darwin 

More  than  tliat,  lie  brought  them  all  over  in  the  long 
run  as  deserters  into  his  own  camp,  and  converted  them 
from  doubtful  and  suspicious  foes  into  warm  adherents 
of  the  evolutionary  banner. 

Moreover,  fortunately  for  the  world,  Darwin's  own 
mind  was  essentially  one  of  the  inductive  type.  If  a 
great  deductive  thinker  and  speculator  like  Herbert 
Spencer  had  hit  upon  the  self-same  idea  of  survival  of 
the  fittest,  he  might  have  communicated  it  to  a  small 
following  of  receptive  disciples,  who  would  have  under- 
stood it  and  accepted  it,  on  a  priori  grounds  alone,  and 
gradually  passed  it  on  to  the  grades  beneath  them ;  but 
he  would  never  have  touched  the  slow  and  cautious 
elephantine  intellect  of  the  masses.  The  common  run 
of  mankind  are  not  deductive;  they  require  to  have 
everything  made  quite  clear  to  them  by  example  and 
instance.  The  English  intelligence  in  particular  shows 
itself  as  a  rule  congenitally  incapable  of  appreciating 
the  superior  logical  certitude  of  the  deductive  method. 
Englishmen  will  not  even  believe  that  the  square  on 
the  hypotenuse  is  equal  to  the  squares  on  the  containing 
sides  until  they  have  measured  and  weighed  as  well  as 
they  are  able  by  rude  experimental  devices  a  few  selected 
pieces  of  rudely  shaped  rectangular  paper.  It  was  a 
great  gain,  therefore,  that  the  task  of  reconstructing 
the  course  of  organic  evolution  should  fall  to  the  lot  of 
a  highly  trained  and  masterly  intelligence  of  the  in- 
ductive order.  Darwin  had  first  to  convince  himself, 
and  then  he  could  proceed  to  convince  the  world.  He 
set  about  the  task  with  characteristic  patience  and 
thoroughness.  No  man  that  ever  Hved  possessed  in  a 
more  remarkable  degree  than  he  did  the  innate  capacity 


The  Period  of  Incubation  63 

for  taking  trouble.  For  five  years,  as  a  mere  pre- 
liminary, he  accumulated  facts  in  immense  variety,  and 
then  for  the  first  time  and  in  the  vaguest  possible  way 
he  '  allowed  himself  to  speculate/  That  brings  us  down 
to  the  year  1842,  when  the  first  notes  of  the  '  Origin  of 
Species'  must  have  been  tentatively  committed  to 
paper.  'It  was  in  1859  that  the  first  edition  of  the 
complete  work  was  given  to  the  world.  Compare  this 
with  the  case  of  Newton,  who  similarly  kept  his  grand 
idea  of  gravitation  for  many  years  in  embryo,  until 
more  exact  measurements  of  the  moon's  mass  and  dis- 
tance should  enable  him  to  verify  it  to  his  own  satis- 
faction. 

One  other  item  of  immense  importance  in  the  genesis 
of  the  full  Darwinian  doctrine  deserves  mention  here — 
I  mean,  the  exact  moment  of  time  occupied  by  Charles 
Darwin  in  the  continuous  history  of  scientific  thought. 
A  generation  or  two  earlier,  in  Erasmus  Darwin's  days, 
biology  had  not  yet  arrived  at  the  true  classification  of 
animals  and  plants  upon  an  essentially  hereditary  basis. 
The  Linntean  arrangement,  then  universally  accepted, 
was  wholly  artificial  in  its  main  features  ;  it  distributed 
species  without  regard  to  their  fundamental  likenesses 
of  structure  and  organisation.  But  the  natural  system 
of  Jussieu  and  De  Candolle,  by  arranging  plants  into 
truly  related  groups,  made  possible  the  proofs  of  an 
order  of  affiliation  in  the  vegetable  kingdom;  while 
Cuvier's  similar  reconstruction  of  the  animal  world 
gave  a  like  foothold  to  the  evolutionary  philosopher  in 
the  other  great  department  of  organic  nature.  The 
recognition  of  kinship  between  the  various  members 
of  the  same  family  necessarily  preceded  the  establish- 


64  Charles  Darwin 

inent  of  a  regular  genealogical  theory  of  life  in  its 
entirety. 

Though  we  are  here  concerned  mainly  with  Charles 
Darwin  the  thinker  and  writer — not  with  Charles  Darwin 
the  husband  and  father — a  few  words  of  explanation  as 
to  his  private  life  must  necessarily  be  added  at  the 
present  point,  before  we  pass  on  to  consider  the  long, 
slow,  and  cautious  brewing  of  that  wonderful  work,  the 

*  Origin  of  Species.'  Darwin  returned  home  from  the 
voyage  of  the  '  Beagle '  at  the  end  of  the  year  1836. 
Soon  after,  he  was  elected  a  Fellow  of  the  Royal  Society, 
no  doubt  through  the  influence  of  his  friend  Lyell,  who 
was  quite  enthusiastic  over  his  splendid  geological 
investigations  on  the  rato  of  elevation  in  the  Pampas 
and  the  Cordillera.  Acting  on  Lyell's  advice,  too,  he 
determined  to  seek  no  x)flBcial  appointment,  but  to 
devote  himself  entirely  for  the  rest  of  his  life  to  the 
pursuit  of  science.  In  1838,  at  the  age  of  twenty-nine, 
he  read  before  the  Geological  Society  his  paper  on  the 

*  Connection  of  Volcanic  Phenomena  with  the  Elevation 
of  Mountain  Chains,'  when,  says  Lyell  admiringly  in  a 
private  letter,  '  he  opened  upon  De  la  Beche,  Phillips, 
and  others ' — the  veterans  of  the  science — *  his  whole 
battery  of  the  earthquakes  and  volcanoes  of  the  Andes.' 
Shortly  after,  the  audacious  young  man  was  appointed 
secretary  to  the  Geological  Society,  a  post  which  he 
filled  when  the  voyage  of  the  '  Beagle '  was  first  pub- 
lished in  1839. 

In  the  early  part  of  that  same  year,  the  rising 
naturalist  took  to  himself  a  wife  from  one  of  the 
houses  to  which  he  himself  owed  no  small  part  of  his 
conspicuous  greatness.    His  choice  fell  upon  his  cousin. 


The  Period  of  Incubation  65 

Miss  Emma  Wedgwood,  daughter  of  Josiah  "Wedg\vood, 
of  Maer  Hall ;  and,  after  three  years  of  married  life  in 
London,  he  settled  at  last  at  Down  House,  near  Orping- 
ton, in  Kent,  where  for  the  rest  of  his  days  he  passed 
his  time  among  his  conservatories  and  his  pigeons,  his 
garden  and  his  fowls,  with  his  children  growing  up 
quietly  beside  him,  and  the  great  thinking  world  of 
London  within  easy  reach  of  a  few  minutes'  journey. 
His  private  means  enabled  him  to  live  the  pleasant  life 
of  an  English  country  gentleman,  and  devote  himself 
unremittingly  to  the  pursuit  of  science.  Ill  health, 
indeed,  interfered  sadly  with  his  powers  of  work ;  but 
system  and  patience  did  wonders  during  his  working 
days,  which  were  regularly  parcelled  out  between  study 
and  recreation,  and  utilised  and  economised  in  the 
very  highest  possible  degree.  Early  to  bed  and  early 
to  rise,  wandering  unseen  among  the  lanes  and  paths, 
or  riding  slowly  on  his  favourite  black  cob,  the  great 
naturalist  passed  forty  years  happily  and  usefully  at 
Down,  where  all  the  village  knew  and  loved  him.  A 
man  of  singular  simplicity  and  largeness  of  heart, 
Charles  Darwin  never  really  learnt  to  know  his  own 
greatness.  And  that  charming  innocence  and  ignorance 
of  his  real  value  made  the  value  itself  all  the  greater. 
His  moral  qualities,  indeed,  were  no  less  admirable  and 
unique  in  their  way  than  his  intellectual  faculties.  To 
that  charming  candour  and  delightful  unostentatious- 
ness  which  everybody  must  have  noticed  in  his  published 
writings,  he  united  in  private  life  a  kindliness  of  dis- 
position, a  width  of  sympathy,  and  a  ready  generosity 
which  made  him  as  much  beloved  by  his  friends  as  he 
was  admired  aji4  respected  by  all  Europe.  The  very 
7 


66  Charles  Darwin 

servants  who  came  beneath  his  roof  stopped  there  for 
the  most  part  during  their  whole  lifetime.  In  his 
earlier  years  at  Down,  the  quiet  Kentish  home  was 
constantly  enlivened  by  the  visits  of  men  like  Lyell, 
Huxley,  Hooker,  Lubbock,  and  WoUaston.  During  his 
later  days,  it  was  the  Mecca  of  a  world-wide  scientific 
and  philosophic  pilgrimage,  where  all  the  greatest  men 
our  age  has  produced  sought  at  times  the  rare  honour 
of  sitting  before  the  face  pf  the  immortal  master.  But 
to  the  very  last  Darwin  himself  never  seemed  to  dis- 
cover that  he  was  anything  more  than  just  an  average 
man  of  science  among  his  natural  peers. 

Shortly  after  Darwin  went  to  Down  he  began  one 
long  and  memorable  experiment,  which  in  itself  casts  a 
flood  of  light  upon  his  patient  and  painstaking  method 
of  inquiry.  Two  years  before,  he  had  read  at  the  Geo- 
logical Society  a  paper  on  the  '  Formation  of  Mould,' 
which  more  than  thirty  years  later  he  expanded  into 
his  famous  treatise  on  the  'Action  of  Earthworms.' 
His  uncle  and  father-in-law,  Josiah  Wedgwood,  sug- 
gested to  him  that  the  apparent  sinking  of  stones  on 
the  surface  might  really  be  due  to  earthworm  castings. 
So,  as  soon  as  he  had  some  land  of  his  own  to  experi- 
ment upon,  he  began,  in  1842,  to  spread  broken  chalk 
over  a  field  at  Down,  in  which,  twenty-nine  years  later, 
in  1871,  a  trench  was  dug  to  test  the  results.  What 
other  naturalist  ever  waited  so  long  and  so  patiently  to 
discover  the  upshot  of  a  single  experiment  ?  Is  it  wonder- 
ful that  a  man  who  worked  like  that  should  succeed,  not 
by  faith  but  by  logical  power,  in  removing  mountains  ? 

Unfortunately,  we  do  not  know  the  exact  date  when 
Darwin  first  read  Malthus.     But  that  the  perusal  of 


The  Period  of  Incubation  67 

that  remarkable  book  formed  a  crisis  and  taming-point 
in  his  mental  development  we  know  from  his  own 
distinct  statement  in  a  letter  to  Haeckel,  prefixed  to 
the  brilliant  German  evolutionist's  '  History  of  Creation.* 
'  It  seemed  to  me  probable,'  says  Darwin,  speaking  of 
his  own  early  development,  '  that  allied  species  were 
descended  from  a  common  ancestor.  But  during  several 
years  I  could  not  conceive  how  each  form  could  have 
been  modified  so  as  to  become  admirably  adapted  to  its 
place  in  nature.  I  began  therefore  to  study  domesti- 
cated animals  and  cultivated  plants,  and  after  a  time 
perceived  that  man's  power  of  selecting  and  breeding 
from  certain  individuals  was  the  most  powerful  of  all 
means  in  the  production  of  new  races.  Having  attended 
to  the  habits  of  animals  and  their  relations  to  the  sur- 
rounding conditions,  I  was  able  to  realise  the  severe 
struggle  for  existence  to  which  all  organisms  are  sub- 
jected ;  and  my  geological  observations  had  allowed  me 
to  appreciate  to  a  certain  extent  the  duration  of  past 
geological  periods.  With  my  mind  thus  prepared  I 
fortunately  happened  to  read  Malthus's  "  Essay  on  Popu- 
lation ; "  and  the  idea  of  natural  selection  through  the 
struggle  for  existence  at  once  occurred  to  me.  Of  all  the 
subordinate  points  in  the  theory,  the  last  which  I  under- 
stood was  the  cause  of  the  tendency  in  the  descendants 
from  a  common  progenitor  to  diverge  in  character.' 

It  is  impossible,  indeed,  to  overrate  the  importance 
of  Malthus,  viewed  as  a  schoolmaster  to  bring  men  to 
Darwin,  and  to  bring  Darwin  himself  to  the  truth. 
Without  the  '  Essay  on  the  Principle  of  Population '  it  is 
quite  conceivable  that  we  should  never  have  had  the 
*  Origin  of  Species '  or  the  '  Descent  of  Man.' 


68  Charles  Darwin 

At  the  same  time,  Darwin  had  not  been  idle  in 
other  departments  of  scientific  work.  Side  by  side  with 
his  collections  for  his  final  efibrt  he  had  been  busy  on 
his  valuable  treatise  upon  Coral  Reefs,  in  which  he 
proved,  mainly  from  his  own  observations  on  the  Keeling 
archipelago,  that  atolls  owe  their  origin  to  a  subsidence 
of  the  supporting  ocean-floor,  the  rate  of  upward  growth 
of  the  reefs  keeping  pace  on  the  whole  with  the  gradual 
depression  of  the  sea-bottom.  '  No  more  admirable 
example  of  scientific  method,'  says  Professor  Geikie 
forty  years  later,  '  was  ever  given  to  the  world ;  and 
even  if  he  had  written  nothing  else,  this  treatise  alone 
would  have  placed  Darwin  in  the  very  front  of  investi- 
gators of  nature.'  But,  from  our  present  psychological 
and  historical  point  of  view,  as  a  moment  in  the  de- 
velopment of  Darwin's  influence,  and  therefore  of  the 
evolutionary  impulse  in  general,  it  possesses  a  still 
greater  and  more  profound  importance,  because  the 
work  in  which  the  theory  is  unfolded  forms  a  perfect 
masterpiece  of  thorough  and  comprehensive  inductive 
method,  and  gained  for  its  author  a  well-deserved  repu- 
tation as  a  sound  and  sober  scientific  inquirer.  The  ac- 
quisition of  such  a  reputation,  afterwards  increased  by  the 
publication  of  the  monograph  on  the  Family  Cirripedia 
(in  1851),  proved  of  immense  use  to  Charles  Darwin  in 
the  fierce  battle  which  was  to  rage  around  the  uncon- 
scious body  of  the  '  Origin  of  Species.'  To  be '  sound '  is 
everywhere  of  incalculable  value ;  to  have  approved  one- 
self to  the  slow  and  cautious  intelligence  of  the  Philistine 
classes  is  a  mighty  spear  and  shield  for  a  strong  man ; 
but  in  England,  and  above  all  in  scientific  England,  it 
is  absolutely  indispensable  to  the  thinker  who  would 


The  Period  of  Incubation  6g 

accomplish  any  great  revolution.  Soundness  is  to  the 
world  of  science  what  respectability  is  to  the  world  of 
business — the  sine  qua  non  for  successfully  gaining  even 
a  hearing  from  established  personages. 

To  read  the  book  on  Coral  Reefs  is  indeed  to  take  a 
lesson  of  the  deepest  value  in  applied  inductive  canons. 
Every  fact  is  duly  marshalled:  every  conclusion  is 
drawn  by  the  truest  and  most  legitimate  process  from 
careful  observation  or  crucial  experiment.  Bit  by  bit, 
Darwin  shows  most  admirably  that,  through  gradual 
submergence,  fringing  reefs  are  developed  into  barrier- 
reefs,  and  these  again  into  atolls  or  lagoon  islands ;  and 
incidentally  he  throws  a  vivid  light  on  the  slow  secular 
movements  upward  or  downward  for  ever  taking  place 
in  the  world's  crust.  But  the  value  of  the  work  as  a 
geological  record,  great  as  it  is,  is  as  nothing  compared 
with  its  value  as  a  training  exercise  in  inductive  logic. 
Darwin  was  now  learning  by  experience  how  to  use  his 
own  immense  powers. 

Meanwhile,  the  environment  too  had  been  gradually 
moving.  In  1832,  the  year  after  young  Darwin  set  out 
upon  his  cruise,  Lyell  published  the  first  edition  of  his 
'Principles  of  Geology,'  establishing  once  for  all  the 
uniformitarian  concept  of  that  branch  of  science.  In 
1836,  the  year  when  he  returned,  Rafinesque,  in  his 
*  New  Flora  of  North  America,'  had  accepted  within 
certain  cramping  limits  the  idea  that  '  all  species  might 
once  have  been  varieties,  and  that  many  varieties  are 
gradually  becoming  species  by  assuming  constant  and 
peculiar  characters.'  Haldeman  in  Boston,  and  Grant 
at  University  College,  London,  were  teaching  from  their 
professorial  chairs  the  self-same  novel  and  revolutionary 


70  Charles  Darwin 

doctrine.  At  last,  in  1844,  Eobert  Chambers  published 
anonymously  his  famous  and  much-debated  'Vestiges 
of  Creation,'  which  brought  down  the  question  of  evolu- 
tion versus  creation  from  the  senate  of  savants  to  the 
arena  of  the  mere  general  public,  and  set  up  at  once  a 
universal  fever  of  inquiry  into  the  mysterious  question 
of  the  origin  of  species.  Chambers  himself  was  a  man 
rather  of  general  knowledge  and  some  native  philo- 
sophical insight  than  of  any  marked  scientific  accuracy 
or  depth.  His  work  in  its  original  form  displayed 
comparatively  little  acquaintance  with  the  vast  ground- 
work of  the  question  at  issue — zoological,  botanical, 
geological,  and  so  forth — and  in  Charles  Darwin's  ovsm 
opinion  s)iowed  *  a  great  want  of  scientific  caution.* 
But  its  graphic  style,  its  vivid  picturesqueness,  and  to 
the  world  at  large  the  startling  novelty  of  its  brilliant 
and  piquant  suggestions,  made  it  burst  at  once  into  an 
unwonted  popularity  for  a  work  of  so  distinctly  philo- 
sophical a  character.  In  nine  years  it  leaped  rapidly 
through  no  less  than  ten  successive  editions,  and  re- 
mained until  the  publication  of  the  '  Origin  of  Species ' 
the  chief  authoritative  exponent  in  England  of  the  still 
struggling  evolutionary  principle. 

The  '  Vestiges  of  Creation '  may  be  succinctly  de- 
scribed as  Lamarck  and  water,  the  watery  element 
being  due  in  part  to  the  unnecessary  obtrusion  (more 
Scotico)  of  a  metaphysical  and  theological  principle  into 
the  physical  universe.  Chambers  himself,  in  his  latest 
edition  (before  the  book  was  finally  killed  by  the  advent 
of  Darwinism),  thus  briefly  describes  his  main  concepts : 
'  The  several  series  of  animated  beings,  from  the  simplest 
and  oldest  up  to  the  highest  and  most  recent,  are,  under 


The  Period  of  Incubation  71 

the  providence  of  God,  the  results,  jirst^  of  an  impulse 
which  has  been  imparted  to  the  forms  of  life,  advancing 
them,  in  definite  times,  by  generation,  through  grades 
of  organisation,  terminating  in  the  highest  dicotyledons 
and  vertebrata,  these  grades  being  few  in  number,  and 
generally  marked  by  intervals  of  organic  character, 
which  we  find  to  be  a  practical  difficulty  in  ascertaining 
affinities;  second^  of  another  impulse  connected  with 
the  vital  forces,  tending,  in  the  course  of  generations,  to 
modify  organic  structures  in  accordance  with  external 
circumstances,  as  food,  the  nature  of  the  habitat,  and 
the  meteoric  agencies.'  Now  it  is  clear  at  once  that 
these  two  supposed  '  impulses '  are  really  quite  miracu- 
lous in  their  essence.  They  do  not  help  us  at  all  to  a 
distinct  physical  and  realisable  conception  of  any  natural 
agency  whereby  species  became  differentiated  one  from 
the  other.  They  lay  the  whole  burden  of  species- 
making  upon  a  single  primordial  supernatural  impetus, 
imparted  to  the  first  living  germ  by  the  will  of  the 
Creator,  and  acting  ever  since  continuously  it  is  true, 
but  none  the  less  miraculously  for  all  that.  For  many 
creations  Chambers  substitutes  one  single  long  creative 
nisus  :  where  Darwin  saw  natural  selection,  his  Scotch 
predecessor  saw  a  deus  ex  macJdna,  helping  on  the 
course  of  organic  development  by  a  constant  but  unseen 
interference  from  above.  He  supposed  evolution  to  be 
predetermined  by  some  intrinsic  and  externally  im- 
planted proclivity.  In  short,  Chambers's  theory  is 
Lamarck's  theologised,  and  spoilt  in  the  process. 

The  book  had  nevei'theless  a  most  prodigious  and 
perfectly  unprecedented  success.  The  secret  of  its 
authorship  was  keenly  debated  and  jealously  kept.    The 


72  Charles  Darwin 

most  ridiculous  surmises  as  to  its  anonymous  origin 
were  everywhere  afloat.  Some  attributed  it  to  Thackeray, 
and  some  to  Prince  Albert,  some  to  Lyell,  some  to  Sir 
John  Herschel,  and  some  to  Charles  Darwin  himself. 
Obscurantists  thought  it  a  wicked  book ;  '  intellectual ' 
people  thought  it  an  advanced  book.  As  a  matter  of 
fact  it  was  neither  the  one  nor  the  other.  It  was  just 
a  pale  and  colourless  transcript  of  the  old  familiar 
teleological  Lamarckism.  Yet  it  did  good  in  its 
generation.  The  public  at  large  were  induced  by  its 
ephemeral  vogue  to  interest  themselves  in  a  question  to 
which  they  had  never  previously  given  even  a  passing 
thought,  though  more  practised  biologists  of  evolutionary 
tendencies  were  grieved  at  heart  that  evolution  should 
first  have  been  popularly  presented  to  the  English 
world  under  so  unscientific,  garbled,  and  mutilated  a 
form.  From  the  philosophic  side,  Herbert  Spencer 
found  '  this  ascription  of  organic  evolution  to  some 
aptitude  naturally  possessed  by  organisms  or  miracu- 
lously imposed  upon  them '  to  be  '  one  of  those  explana- 
tions which  explain  nothing — a  shaping  of  ignorance 
into  the  semblance  of  knowledge.  The  cause  assigned,' 
he  says,  '  is  not  a  true  cause — not  a  cause  assimilable 
to  known  causes — not  a  cause  that  can  be  anywhere 
shown  to  produce  analogous  efiects.  It  is  a  cause  un- 
representable in  thought:  one  of  those  illegitimate 
symbolic  conceptions  which  cannot  by  any  mental  pro- 
cess be  elaborated  into  a  real  conception.'  From  the 
scientific  side,  on  the  other  hand,  Darwin  felt  sadly  the 
inaccuracy  and  want  of  profound  technical  knowledge 
everywhere  displayed  by  the  anonymous  author.  These 
things  might  naturally  cause  the  enemy  to  blaspheme. 


The  Period  of  Incubation  73 

No  worse  calamity,  indeed,  can  happen  to  a  great  truth 
than  for  its  defence  to  be  intrusted  to  inefficient  hands. 
Nevertheless,  long  after,  in  the  '  Origin  of  Species,* 
the  great  naturalist  wrote  with  generous  appreciation  of 
the  '  Vestiges  of  Creation,'  '  In  my  own  opinion  it  has 
done  excellent  service  in  this  country  in  calling  attention 
to  the  subject,  in  removing  prejudice,  and  in  thus  pre- 
paring the  ground  for  the  reception  of  analogous  views/ 
Still  Darwin  gave  no  sign.  A  flaccid,  cartilaginous, 
unphilosophic  evolutionism  had  full  possession  of  the 
field  for  the  moment,  and  claimed,  as  it  were,  to  be  the 
genuine  representative  of  the  young  and  vigorous 
biological  creed,  while  he  himself  was  in  truth  the  real 
heir  to  all  the  honours  of  the  situation.  He  was  in 
possession  of  the  master-key  which  alone  could  unlock 
the  bars  that  opposed  the  progress  of  evolution,  and  still 
he  waited.  He  could  afford  to  wait.  He  was  diligently 
collecting,  amassing,  investigating;  eagerly  reading 
every  new  systematic  work,  every  book  of  travels,  every 
scientific  journal,  every  record  of  sport,  or  exploration,  or 
discovery,  to  extract  from  the  dead  mass  of  undigested 
fact  whatever  item  of  implicit  value  might  swell  the 
definite  co-ordinated  series  of  notes  in  his  own  common- 
place  books  for  the  now  distinctly  contemplated  '  Origin 
of  Species.'  His  way  was  to  make  all  sure  behind  him, 
to  summon  up  all  his  facts  in  irresistible  array,  and 
never  to  set  out  upon  a  public  progress  until  he  was 
secure  against  all  possible  attacks  of  the  ever- watchful 
and  alert  enemy  in  the  rear.  Few  men  would  have 
had  strength  of  mind  enough  to  resist  the  temptation 
offered  by  the  publication  of  the  '  Vestiges  of  Creation,' 
and  the  extraordinary  success  attained  by  so  flabby  a 


74  Charles  Darwin 

presentation  of  the  evolutionary  case  :  Darwin  resisted 
itj  and  he  did  wisely. 

We  may,  however,  take  it  for  granted,  I  doubt  not, 
that  it  was  the  appearance  and  success  of  Chambers's 
invertebrate  book  which  induced  Darwin,  in  1844  (the 
year  of  its  publication),  to  enlarge  his  short  notes  '  into 
a  sketch  of  the  conclusions  which  then  seemed  to  him 
probable.'  This  sketch  he  showed  to  Dr.  (now  Sir 
Joseph)  Hooker,  no  doubt  as  a  precaution  to  ensure  his 
own  claim  of  priority  against  any  future  possible  com- 
petitor. And  having  thus  eased  his  mind  for  the 
moment,  he  continued  to  observe,  to  read,  to  devour 
'  Transactions,'  to  collate  instances,  with  indefatigable 
persistence  for  fifteen  years  longer.  If  any  man  mentally 
measures  out  fifteen  years  of  his  own  life,  and  bethinks 
him  of  how  long  a  space  it  seems  when  thus  deliberately 
pictured,  he  will  be  able  to  realise  a  little  more  definitely 
— but  only  a  little — how  profound  was  the  patience, 
the  self-denial,  the  single-mindedness  of  Darwin's  intense 
search  after  the  ultimate  truths  of  natural  science. 

What  was  the  sketch  that  he  thus  committed  to 
paper  in  1844,  and  submitted  to  the  judgment  of  his 
friend  Hooker?  It  was  the  germ  of  the  theory  of 
natural  selection.  According  to  that  theory,  organic 
development  is  due  to  the  survival  of  the  fittest  among 
innumerable  variations,  good,  bad,  and  indifferent,  from 
one  or  more  parent  stocks.  Darwin's  reading  of  Mal- 
thus  had  suggested  to  him  (apparently  as  early  as  the 
date  of  publication  of  the  *  Naturalist's  Journal ')  the 
idea  that  every  species  of  plant  and  animal  must  always 
be  producing  a  far  greater  number  of  seeds,  eggs,  germs, 
or  young  oflfspring  than  could  possibly  be  needed  for 


The  Period  of  Incubation  75 

the  maintenance  of  the  average  number  of  the  species. 
Of  these  young,  by  far  the  greater  number  must  always 
perish  from  generation  to  generation,  for  want  of  space, 
of  food,  of  air,  of  raw  material.  The  survivors  in  each 
brood  must  be  those  naturally  best  adapted  for  survival. 
The  many  would  be  eaten,  starved,  overrun,  or  crowded 
out ;  the  few  that  survive  would  be  those  that  possessed 
any  special  means  of  defence  against  aggressors,  any 
special  advantage  for  escaping  starvation,  any  special 
protection  against  overrunning  or  overcrowding  foes. 
Animals  and  plants,  Darwin  found  on  inquiry  and  in- 
vestigation, tended  to  vary  under  diverse  circumstances 
from  the  parent  or  parents  that  originally  produced 
them.  These  variations  were  usually  infinitesimal  in 
amount,  but  sometimes  more  considerable  or  even 
striking.  If  any  particular  variation  tended  in  any 
way  to  preserve  the  life  of  the  creatures  that  exhibited 
it,  beyond  the  average  of  their  like  competitors,  that 
variation  would  in  the  long  run  survive,  and  the  indi- 
viduals that  possessed  it,  being  thus  favoured  in  the 
struggle  for  existence,  would  replace  the  less  adapted 
form  from  which  they  sprang.  Darwinism  is  Malthusian- 
ism  on  the  large  scale :  it  is  the  application  of  the 
calculus  of  population  to  the  wide  facts  of -universal  life. 
In  one  sense,  indeed,  it  may  be  said  that,  given 
Malthus  on  the  one  hand  and  the  Lamarckian  evolu- 
tionism on  the  other,  some  great  man  somewhere  must 
sooner  or  later,  almost  of  necessity,  have  combined 
the  two,  and  hit  out  the  doctrine  of  natural  selection  as 
we  actually  know  it.  Quite  so ;  but  then  the  point  is 
just  this :  Darwin  was  the  great  man  in  question ;  he 
did  the  work  which  in  the  very  essence  of  things  some 


76  Charles  Darwin 

sucli  great  man  was  naturally  and  inevitably  predestined 
to  do.  You  can  always  easily  manage  to  get  on  without 
any  particular  great  man,  provided,  of  course,  you  have 
ready  to  hand  another  equally  able  great  man  by  whom 
to  replace  him  in  the  scheme  of  existence.  But  how 
many  ordinary  naturalists  possess  the  width  of  mind 
and  universality  of  interest  which  would  prompt  them 
to  read,  mark,  learn,  and  inwardly  digest  a  politico- 
economical  treatise  of  the  calibre  of  Malthus?  How 
many,  having  done  so,  have  the  keenness  of  vision  to 
perceive  the  ensuing  biological  implications?  How 
many,  having  seen  them,  have  the  skill  and  the  patience 
to  work  up  the  infinite  chaos  of  botanical  and  zoological 
detail  into  the  far-reaching  generalisations  of  the '  Origin 
of  Species '  ?  Merely  to  have  caught  at  the  grand  idea 
is  in  itself  no  small  achievement ;  others  did  so  and 
deserve  all  honour  for  their  insight ;  but  to  flesh  it  out 
with  all  the  minute  care  and  conclusive  force  of  Darwin's 
masterpiece  is  a  thousand  times  a  greater  and  nobler 
monument  of  human  endeavour. 

During  the  fifteen  years  from  1844  to  1859,  how- 
ever, Darwin's  pen  was  by  no  means  idle.  In  the  first- 
named  year  he  published  his  '  Geological  Observations 
on  Volcanic  Islands ' — part  of  the  '  Beagle '  exploration 
series;  in  1846  he  followed  this  up  by  his  'Geological 
Observations  on  South  America;'  in  1851  he  gave  to 
the  world  his  monograph  on  *  Recent  Barnacles ; '  and 
in  1853,  his  treatise  on  the  fossil  species  of  the  same 
family.  But  all  these  works  of  restricted  interest 
remained  always  subsidiary  to  the  one  great  central 
task  of  his  entire  lifetime,  the  preparation  of  his  pro- 
jected volume  on  the  Origin  of  Species. 


The  Period  of  Incubation  yy 

All  through  the  middle  decades  of  the  century 
Darwin  continued  to  labour  at  his  vast  accumulation  of 
illustrative  facts ;  and  side  by  side  with  his  continuous 
toil,  outside  opinion  kept  paving  the  way  for  the  final 
acceptance  of  his  lucid  ideas.  The  public  was  buying 
and  reading  all  the  time  its  ten  editions  of  the  '  Vestiges 
of  Creation.'  It  was  slowly  digesting  Lyell's '  Principles 
of  Geology,'  in  which  the  old  cataclysmic  theories  were 
featly  demolished,  and  the  uniformitarian  conception 
of  a  past  gradually  and  insensibly  merging  into  the 
present  was  conclusively  established.  It  was  getting 
accustomed  to  statements  like  those  of  the  younger 
St.  Hilaire,  in  1850,  that  specific  characters  may  be 
modified  by  changes  in  the  environing  conditions,  and 
that  the  modifications  thus  produced  may  often  be  of 
generic  value — may  make  a  difference  so  great  that  we 
must  regard  the  product  not  merely  as  belonging  to  a 
distinct  species,  but  even  to  a  distinct  genus  or  higher 
kind.  In  1852  Herbert  Spencer  published  in  the 
'  Leader '  his  remarkable  essay,  contrasting  the  theories 
of  creation  and  evolution,  as  applied  to  organic  beings, 
with  all  the  biting  force  of  his  profound  intelligence ; 
and  in  1855,  the  same  encyclopaedic  philosopher  put 
forth  the  first  rough  sketch  of  his  'Principles  of 
Psychology,'  in  which  he  took  the  lead  in  treating  the 
phenomena  of  mind  from  the  point  of  view  of  gradual 
development.  In  that  extraordinary  work,  the  philo- 
sopher of  evolution  traced  the  origin  of  all  mental 
powers  and  faculties  by  slow  gradations  from  the  very 
simplest  subjective  elements.  The  '  Principles  of 
Psychology '  preceded  the  '  Origin  of  Species '  by  nearly 
five  years ;  the  first  collected  volume  of  Mr.  Spencer's 


78  Charles  Darwin 

essays  preceded  Darwin's  work  by  some  twelve  months. 
Baden-Powell's  essay  on  the  '  Philosophy  of  Creation ' 
(much  debated  and  condemned  in  ecclesiastical  circles), 
and  Professor  Owen's  somewhat  contradictory  utterances 
on  the  nature  of  types  and  archetypal  ideas,  also  helped 
to  keep  alive  interest  in  the  problem  of  origins  up  to 
the  very  moment  of  the  final  appearance  of  Darwin's 
great  and  splendid  solution. 

It  is  interesting  during  these  intermediate  years  to 
watch  from  time  to  time  the  occasional  side-hints  of 
Darwin's  activity  and  of  the  interest  it  aroused  among 
his  scientific  contemporaries.  In  1854,  foi;  example, 
Sir  Charles  Lyell  notes,  after  an  evening  at  Darwin's, 
how  Sir  Joseph  Hooker  astonished  him  with  an  account 
of  that  strange  orchid,  Catasetum,  which  bears  three 
totally  distinct  kinds  of  flowers  on  the  same  plant ;  '  It 
"will  figure,'  he  says,  '  in  C.  Darwin's  book  on  species, 
with  many  other  "  ugly  facts,"  as  Hooker,  clinging  like 
me  to  the  orthodox  faith,  calls  these  and  other  abnormal 
vagaries.'  On  a  similar  occasion,  a  little  later,  Lyell 
asks,  after  meeting  '  Huxley,  Hooker,  and  Wollaston  at 
Darwin's,'  'After  all,  did  we  not  come  from  an  ourang  ?' 
Last  of  all,  in  1857,  Darwin  himself  writes  an  anti- 
cipatory letter  to  his  American  friend,  Asa  Gray,  in 
which  he  mentions  '  six  points ' — the  cardinal  concep- 
tions of  the  '  Origin  of  Species.'  His  book  is  now 
fairly  under  weigh ;  he  speaks  of  it  himself  to  acquaint- 
ance and  correspondents  as  an  acknowledged  project. 

Events  were  growing  ripe  for  the  birth.  A  lucky 
accident  precipitated  its  parturition  in  the  coursfc  of  the 
year  1858. 


CHAI^ER  VI. 

*TnE   ORIGIN   OF  SPECIES.* 

The  accident  came  in  this  wise. 

Alfred  Russel  Wallace,  a  young  "Welsh  biologist, 
went  out  at  twenty-four,  in  1848,  to  the  Amazons  River, 
in  company  with  Bates  (the  author  of  '  The  Naturalist 
on  the  Amazons ' ),  to  collect  birds  and  butterflies,  and 
to  study  tropical  life  in  the  richest  region  of  equatorial 
America.  Like  all  other  higher  zoologists  of  their  time, 
the  two  young  explorers  were  deeply  interested  in  the 
profound  questions  of  origin  and  metamorphosis,  and  of 
geographical  distribution,  and  in  the  letters  that  passed 
between  them  before  they  started  they  avowed  to  one 
another  that  the  object  of  their  quest  was  a  solution  of 
the  pressing  biological  enigma  of  creation  or  evolu- 
tion. Starting  with  fresh  hopes  and  a  few  pounds  in 
pocket,  on  an  old,  worn-out,  and  unseaworthy  slave- 
trader,  they  often  discussed  these  deep  problems  of  life 
and  nature  together  upon  the  Sargasso  sea,  or  among 
the  palms  and  lianas  of  the  Brazilian  woodlands.  The 
air  was  thick  with  whiffs  and  foretastes  of  evolutionism, 
and  the  two  budding  naturalists  of  the  Amazous  expe- 
dition had  inhaled  them  eagerly  with  every  breath. 
They  saw  among  the   mimicking   organisms   of  that 


8o  Charles  Darwin 

equatorial  zone  strange  puzzles  to  engage  tlieir  deepest 
attention  ;  they  recognised  in  the  veins  and  spots  that 
diversified  the  filmy  membranes  of  insects'  wings  the 
hieroglyphs  of  nature,  writing  as  on  a  tablet  for  them 
to  decipher  the  story  of  the  slow  modification  of  species. 
In  1852 — the  year  when  Herbert  Spencer  in  England 
published  his  essay  on  the  '  Development  Hypothesis,' 
and  when  Naudin  in  France  put  forth  his  bold  and  able 
paper  on  the  *  Origin  of  Species  ' — Wallace  once  more 
returned  to  Europe,  and  gave  to  the  world  his  interest- 
ing '  Travels  on  the  Amazons  and  the  Rio  Negro.'  Two 
years  later  the  indefatigable  traveller  set  out  a  second 
time  on  a  voyage  of  tropical  exploration,  among  the 
islands  of  the  Malay  archipelago,  and  for  eight  years 
he  wandered  about  in  Malay  huts  and  remote  islets, 
gathering  in  solitude  and  isolation  the  enormous  store 
of  minute  facts  which  he  afterwards  lavished  with  so 
prodigal  a  hand  upon  '  Tropical  Nature,'  and  the  '  Geo- 
graphical Distribution  of  Animals.' 

While  Wallace  was  still  at  Amboyna,  he  sent  home 
in  1858  a  striking  memoir,  addressed  to  Darwin,  with  a 
request  that  he  would  forward  it  to  Sir  Charles  Lyell,  for 
presentation  to  the  Linnean  Society.  Darwin  opened 
and  read  his  brother  naturalist's  paper,  and  found  to  his 
surprise  that  it  contained  his  own  theory  of  natural 
selection,  not  worked  out  in  detail,  as  he  himself  was 
working  it  out,  but  still  complete  in  spirit  and  essence, 
with  no  important  portion  of  the  central  idea  lacking  to 
its  full  rotundity  of  conception.  A  jealous  man  would 
have  thrown  obstacles  in  the  way  of  publication ;  but 
both  Darwin  and  Wallace  were  bom  superior  to  the 
meannesses  of  jealousy.   The  elder  naturalist  commended 


'  The  Origin  of  Species*  8i 

his  young  rival's  paper  at  once  to  Sir  Charles  Lyell, 
who  sent  it  on  immediately  to  tlie  Linnean  Society. 

But  Sir  Charles  Lyell  and  Sir  Joseph  Hooker,  both 
of  whom  knew  of  Darwin's  work,  thought  it  advisable 
that  he  should  publish,  in  the  '  Journal '  of  the  Society, 
a  few  extracts  from  his  o^vn  manuscripts,  side  by  side 
with  Wallace's  paper.  Darwin,  therefore,  selected  some 
essential  passages  for  the  purpose  from  his  own  long- 
gathered  and  voluminous  notes,  and  the  two  contributions 
were  read  together  before  the  Society  on  July  the  1st, 
1858.  That  double  communication  marks  the  date  of 
birth  of  modem  evolutionism.  It  is  to  the  eternal 
credit  of  both  thinkers  that  each  accepted  his  own  true 
position  with  regard  to  the  great  discovery  in  perfect 
sincerity.  The  elder  naturalist  never  strove  for  a 
moment  to  press  his  own  claim  to  priority  against  the 
younger :  the  younger,  with  singular  generosity  and 
courtesy,  waived  his  own  claim  to  divide  the  honours  of 
discovery  in  favour  of  the  elder.  Not  one  word  save 
words  of  fraternal  admiration  and  cordial  appreciation 
ever  passed  the  lips  of  either  with  regard  to  the  other. 

The  distinctive  notion  of  natural  selection,  indeed, 
like  all  true  and  fruitful  ideas,  had  more  than  once 
flashed  for  a  moment  across  the  penetrating  mind  of 
more  than  one  independent  investigator.  As  early  as 
1813,  Dr.  Wells,  the  famous  author  of  the  theory  of 
dew,  applied  that  particular  conception  to  the  single 
case  of  the  production  of  special  races  among  mankind. 

'  Of  the  accidental  varieties  of  man,  which  would 
occur  among  the  first  few  and  scattered  inhabitants  of 
the  middle  regions  of  Africa,'  he  wrote,  '  some  one  would 
be  better  fitted  than  the  others  to  bear  the  diseases  of 


82  Charles  Darwin 

the  country.  This  race  would  consequently  multiply, 
while  the  others  would  decrease ;  not  only  from  their 
inability  to  sustain  the  attacks  of  disease,  but  from  their 
incapacity  of  contending  with  their  more  vigorous 
neighbours,  .  .  .  The  same  disposition  to  form  varieties 
still  existing,  a  darker  and  a  darker  race  would  in  the 
course  of  time  occur ;  and  as  the  darkest  would  be  the 
best  fitted  for  the  climate,  this  would  at  last  become  the 
most  prevalent,  if  not  the  only  race  in  the  country.' 
Here  we  have  not  merely  the  radical  concept  of  natural 
selection,  but  also  the  subordinate  idea  of  its  exertion 
upon  what  Darwin  calls  '  spontaneous  variations.' 
What  is  wanting  in  the  paper  is  the  application  of  the 
faintly  descried  law  to  the  facts  and  circumstances  of 
general  biology :  Wells  saw  only  a  particular  instance, 
where  Darwin  and  Wallace  more  vividly  perceived  a  uni- 
versal principle.  Again,  in  1831,  Mr.  Patrick  Matthew 
in  that  singular  appendix  to  his  book  on  naval  timber 
actually  enunciates  the  same  idea,  applied  this  time 
to  the  whole  of  nature,  in  words  sometimes  almost  iden- 
tical with  Darwin's  own.  '  As  nature  in  all  her  modifi- 
cations of  life,'  says  this  unconscious  discoverer,  '  has  a 
power  of  increase  far  beyond  what  is  needed  to  supply 
the  place  of  what  falls  by  Time's  decay,  those  indivi- 
duals who  possess  not  the  requisite  strength,  swiftness, 
hardihood,  or  cunning,  fall  prematurely  without  repro- 
ducing— either  a  prey  to  their  natural  devourers,  or 
sinking  under  disease,  generally  induced  by  want  of 
nourishment,  their  place  being  occupied  by  the  more 
perfect  of  their  OAvn  kind,  who  are  pressing  on  the 
means  of  existence.  .  .  .  The  self-regulating  adaptive 
disposition  of  organised  life  may,  in  part,  be  traced  to 


•  The  Origin  of  Species  '  8^ 

the  extreme  fecundity  of  nature,  who,  as  before  stated, 
has  in  all  the  varieties  of  her  offspring  a  prolific  power 
much  beyond  (in  many  cases  a  thousandfold)  what  is 
necessary  to  fill  up  the  vacancies  caused  by  senile  decay. 
As  the  field  of  existence  is  limited  and  preoccupied,  it 
is  only  the  hardier,  more  robust,  better-suited-to-cir- 
cumstance  individuals,  who  are  able  to  struggle  forward 
to  maturity,  these  inhabiting  only  the  situations  to 
which  they  have  superior  adaptation  and  greater  power 
of  occupancy  than  any  other  kind ;  the  weaker  and 
less  circumstance-suited  being  prematurely  destroyed. 
This  principle  is  in  constant  action;  it  regulates  the 
colour,  the  figure,  the  capacities,  and  instincts ;  those 
individuals  in  each  species  whose  colour  and  covering 
are  best  suited  to  concealment  or  protection  from 
enemies,  or  defence  from  inclemencies  and  vicissitudes 
of  climate,  whose  figure  is  best  accommodated  to  health, 
strength,  defence,  and  support;  whose  capacities  and 
instincts  can  best  regulate  the  physical  energies  to  self- 
advantage  according  to  circumstances — in  such  im- 
mense waste  of  primary  and  youthful  life  those  only 
come  forward  to  maturity  from  the  strict  ordeal  by 
which  nature  tests  their  adaptation  to  her  standard  of 
perfection  and  fitness  to  continue  their  kind  by  repro- 
duction.' Of  the  ideas  expressed  in  these  paragraphs, 
and  others  which  preceded  them,  Darwin  himself  rightly 
observes,  '  He  gives  precisely  the  same  view  on  the 
origin  of  species  as  that  propounded  by  Mr.  Wallace 
and  myself.  He  clearly  saw  the  full  force  of  the  prin- 
ciple of  natural  selection.' 

In  1852,  once  more,  so  eminent  and  confirmed  an 
evolutionist   as  Mr.  Herbert  Spencer  himself  had  hit 


84  Charles  Darwin" 

upon  a  glimpse  of  the  same  great  truth,  strange  to  say 
without  perceiving  the  width  and  scope  of  its  implica- 
tions. '  All  mankind,'  he  wrote  in  that  year  in  an  essay 
on  population  in  the  '  Westminster  Review,'  '  in  turn 
subject  themselves  more  or  less  to  the  discipline  de- 
scribed ;  they  either  may  or  may  not  advance  under 
it;  but,  in  the  nature  of  things,  only  those  who  do 
advance  under  it  eventually  survive.  For,  necessarily, 
families  and  faces  whom  this  increasing  diflSculty  of 
getting  a  living  which  excess  of  fertility  entails  does 
not  stimulate  to  improvements  in  production  ....  are 
on  the  high  road  to  extinction ;  and  must  ultimately  be 
supplanted  by  those  whom  the  pressure  does  so  stimu- 
late. .  .  .  And  here,  indeed,  without  further  illustra- 
tion, it  will  be  seen  that  premature  death,  under  all  its 
forms,  and  from  all  its  causes,  cannot  fail  to  work  in  the 
same  direction.  For  as  those  prematurely  carried  oflf 
must,  in  the  average  of  cases,  be  those  in  whom  the 
power  of  self-preservation  is  the  least,  it  unavoidably 
follows  that  those  left  behind  to  continue  the  race  must 
be  those  in  whom  the  power  of  self-preservation  is  the 
greatest,  must  be  the  select  of  their  generation.'  In 
this  striking  pre-Darwinian  passage  we  have  a  partial 
perception  of  what  Mr.  Spencer  afterwards  described  as 
the  survival  of  the  fittest ;  but,  as  our  great  philosopher 
himself  remarks,  it  'shows  how  near  one  may  be  to  a 
great  generalisation  without  seeing  it.'  For  not  only 
does  Mr.  Spencer,  like  Wells  before  him,  limit  the 
application  of  the  principle  to  the  case  of  humanity ; 
but,  unlike  Wells,  he  overlooks  the  all-important  factor 
of  spontaneous  variation,  and  the  power  of  natural 
selection,  acting  upon  such,  to  produce   specific   and 


'The  Origin  of  Species'  85 

generic  divergences  of  structure.  In  short,  in  his  own 
words,  the  paragraph  '  contains  merely  a  passing  recog- 
nition of  the  selective  process,  and  indicates  no  suspicion 
of  the  enormous  range  of  its  effects,  or  of  the  conditions 
under  which  a  large  part  of  its  effects  are  produced.' 
On  the  other  hand,  it  must  be  noted  that  both  Spencer 
and  Matthew,  like  Darwin  himself,  based  their  ideas 
largely  upon  the  Malthusian  principle,  and  thus  held 
the  two  true  keys  of  the  situation  fairly  within  their 
unconscious  hands. 

Frankly  to  recognise  these  various  foreshadowings 
of  the  distinctive  Darwinian  theory  of  natural  selection 
is  not  in  any  way  to  undermine  the  foundations  of 
Charles  Darwin's  o^vn  real  and  exceptional  greatness. 
On  the  contrary,  the  mere  fact  that  his  views  were  so 
far  anticipated  by  Wells,  Matthew,  Spencer,  and  others, 
and  were  simultaneously  arrived  at  across  half  the 
globe  by  the  independent  intellect  of  Alfred  Russel 
Wallace,  is  in  itself  the  very  best  proof  and  finest 
criterion  of  Charles  Darwin's  genuine  apostleship.  No 
truly  grand  and  fruitful  idea  was  ever  yet  the  sole 
property  of  a  single  originator.  Great  discoveries,  says 
an  acute  critic,  must  always  be  concerned  with  some 
problem  of  the  time  which  many  of  the  world's  foremost 
minds  are  just  then  cudgelling  their  active  brains  about. 
It  was  so  with  the  discovery  of  the  differential  calculus, 
and  of  the  planet  Neptune ;  with  the  interpretation  of 
the  Egyptian  hieroglyphics,  and  of  the  cuneiform  in- 
scriptions ;  with  the  undulatory  theory  of  light,  with 
the  mechanical  equivalent  of  heat,  with  the  doctrine  of 
the  correlation  and  conservation  of  energies,  with  the 
invention  of  the  steam    engine,   the   locomotive,   the 


S6  Charles  Darwin 

telegraph  and  the  telephone;  with  the  nebular  hypo- 
thesis, and  with  spectrum  analysis.  It  was  so,  too, 
with  the  evolutionary  movement.  The  fertile  upturning 
of  virgin  sod  in  the  biological  field  which  produced 
Darwin's  forerunners,  as  regards  the  idea  of  descent 
with  modification,  in  the  persons  of  Buffon,  Lamarck, 
and  Erasmus  Darwin,  necessarily  produced  a  little  later, 
under  the  fresh  impetus  of  the  Malthusian  conception, 
his  forerunners  or  coadjutors,  as  regards  the  idea  of 
natural  selection,  in  the  persons  of  Wells,  Matthew,  and 
Wallace.  It  was  Darwin's  task  to  recognise  the  uni- 
versal, where  Wells  and  Spencer  had  seen  only  the 
particular ;  to  build  up  a  vast  and  irresistible  inductive 
system,  where  ISIatthew  and  Wallace  had  but  thrown 
out  a  pregnant  hint  of  wonderful  a  'priori  interest  and 
suggestiveness.  It  is  one  thing  to  draw  out  the  idea  of 
a  campaign,  another  thing  to  carry  it  to  a  successful 
conclusion  ;  one  thing  rudely  to  sketch  a  ground-plan, 
another  thing  finally  to  pile  aloft  to  the  sky  the  front 
of  an  august  and  imposing  fabric. 

As  soon  as  the  papers  at  the  Linnean  had  been  read 
and  printed,  Darwin  set  to  Avork  in  real  earnest  to  bring 
out  the  first  instalment  of  his  great  work.  That  instal- 
ment was  the  '  Origin  of  Species.'  The  first  edition 
was  ready  for  the  public  on  November  the  24th,  1859. 

In  his  own  mind  Darwin  regarded  that  immortal 
work  merely  in  the  light  of  an  abstract  of  his  projected 
volumes.  So  immense  were  his  collections  and  so 
voluminous  his  notes  that  the  '  Origin  of  Species '  itself 
seemed  to  him  like  a  mere  small  portion  of  the  contem- 
plated publication.  And  indeed  he  did  ultimately  work 
out  several  other  portions  of  his  original  plan  in  his 


*  The  Origin  of  Species*  By 

detailed  treatises  on  the  Variation  of  Animals  and  Plants 
under  Domestication,  on  the  Effects  of  Cross  and  Self- 
Fertilisation,  and  on  the  Descent  of  Man  and  Sexual 
Selection.  But  the  immense  and  unexpected  vogue  of 
his  first  volume,  the  almost  immediate  revolution  which 
it  caused  in  biological  and  general  opinion,  and  the  all 
but  universal  adhesion  to  his  views  of  all  the  greatest 
and  most  rising  naturalists,  to  a  great  extent  saved  him 
the  trouble  of  carrying  out  in  full  the  task  he  had 
originally  contemplated  as  necessary.  Younger  and 
less  occupied  labourers  tbok  part  of  the  work  off  their 
leader's  hands  ;  the  great  chief  was  left  to  prosecute  his 
special  researches  in  some  special  lines,  and  was  relieved 
from  the  necessity  of  further  proving  in  minuter  detail 
what  he  had  already  proved  with  sufficient  cogency  to 
convince  all  but  the  wilfully  blind  or  the  hopelessly 
stupid. 

The  extraordinary  and  unprecedented  success  of  the 
*  Origin  of  Species  '  is  the  truest  test  of  the  advance  it 
made  upon  all  previous  evolutionary  theorising.  Those 
who  had  never  been  convinced  before  were  now  con- 
vinced by  sheer  force  of  reasoning ;  those  who  believed 
and  those  who  wavered  had  their  faith  confirmed  into 
something  like  the  reposeful  calm  of  absolute  certitude. 

Let  us  consider,  therefore,  what  exactly  were  the 
additions  which  Charles  Darwin  ofiered  in  his  epoch- 
making  work  to  the  pre-existing  conceptions  of  evolu- 
tionists. 

In  1852,  seven  years  before  the  publication  of 
Darwin's  masterpiece,  Mr,  Herbert  Spencer  wrote  as 
follows  in  an  essay  in  the  '  Leader '  on  creation  and 
evolution.     The  expressions  of  so  profound  and  philo- 


88  Charles  Darwin 

sopLical  a  biologist  may  be  regarded  as  tlie  high-water 
mark  of  evolutionary  thinking  np  to  the  date  of  the 
appearance  of  Wallace  and  Darwin's  theory : — 

'Even  could  the  supporters  of  the  development 
hypothesis  merely  show  that  the  production  of  species 
by  the  process  of  modification  is  conceivable,  they 
would  be  in  a  better  position  than  their  opponents. 
But  they  can  do  much  more  than  this  ;  they  can  show 
that  the  process  of  modification  has  effected  and  is 
effecting  great   changes   in  all    organisms,  subject  to 

modifying  influences they  can  show  that  any 

existing  species — animal  or  vegetable — when  placed 
under  conditions  different  from  its  previous  ones,  imme- 
diately begins  to  undergo  certain  changes  of  structure 
fitting  it  for  the  new  conditions.  They  can  show  that 
in  successive  generations  these  changes  continue  until 
ultimately  the  new  conditions  become  the  natural  ones. 
They  can  show  that  in  cultivated  plants  and  domesti- 
cated animals,  and  in  the  several  races  of  men,  these 
changes  have  uniformly  taken  place.  They  can  show 
that  the  degrees  of  difference,  so  produced,  are  often,  as 
in  dogs,  greater  than  those  on  which  distinctions  of 
species  are  in  other  cases  founded.  They  can  show 
that  it  is  a  matter  of  dispute  whether  some  of  these 
modified  forms  are  varieties  or  modified  species.  They 
can  show  too  that  the  changes  daily  taking  place  in 
ourselves ;  the  facility  that  attends  long  practice,  and 
the  loss  of  aptitude  that  begins  when  practice  ceases ; 
the  development  of  every  faculty,  bodily,  moral  or  in- 
tellectual, according  to  the  use  made  of  it,  are  all  ex- 
plicable on  this  same  principle.  And  thus  they  can 
show  that  throughout  all  organic  nature  there  is  at 


'^The  Origin  of  Species''  89 

work  a  modifying  inflaence  of  the  kind  they  assign  as 
the  cause  of  these  specific  differences,  an  influence 
which,  though  slow  in  its  action,  does  in  time,  if  the 
circumstances  demand  it,  produce  marked  changes ;  an 
influence  which,  to  all  appearance,  would  produce  in  the 
millions  of  years,  and  under  the  great  varieties  of 
condition  which  geological  records  imply,  any  amount 
of  change.' 

This  admirable  passage,  written  seven  years  before  the 
publication  of  the  '  Origin  of  Species,'  contains  explicitly 
almost  every  idea  that  ordinary  people,  not  specially 
biological  in  their  interests,  now  associate  with  the 
name  of  Darwin.  That  is  to  say,  it  contains,  in  a  very 
philosophical  and  abstract  form,  the  theory  of  '  descent 
with  modification'  without  the  distinctive  Darwinian 
adjunct  of  *  natural  selection'  or  '  survival  of  the  fittest.' 
Yet  it  was  just  that  particular  lever,  dexterously  applied, 
and  carefully  weighted  with  the  whole  weight  of  his 
endlessly  accumulated  inductive  instances,  that  finally 
enabled  our  modern  Archimedes  in  so  short  a  time  to 
move  the  world.  The  pubUc,  that  was  deaf  to  the  high 
philosophy  of  Herbert  Spencer,  listened  at  once  to  the 
practical  wisdom  of  Charles  Darwin.  They  did  not  care 
at  all  for  the  a  priori  proof,  but  they  believed  forthwith 
as  soon  as  a  cautious  and  careful  investigator  laid  bare 
before  their  eyes  in  minute  detail  the  modus  operandi  of 
nature  herself. 

The  main  argument  of  Darwin's  chief  work  runs 
somewhat  after  the  following  fashion  • : — 

"  The  reraainder  of  the  present  chapter,  which  consists  almost 
entirely  of  an  exposition  of  the  doctrine  of  natural  selection,  may 
Bafely  be  skipped  by  the  reader  already  well  acquainted  with  the 
9 


90  Charles  Darwin 

Variation,  to  a  greater  or  less  degree,  is  a  common 
and  well-known  fact  in  nature.  More  especially,  animals 
and  plants  under  domestication  tend  to  vary  from  one 
another  far  more  than  do  the  individuals  of  any  one 
species  in  the  wild  state.  Rabbits  in  a  warren  are  all 
alike  in  shape,  size,  colour,  and  features  :  rabbits  in  a 
hutch  vary  indefinitely  in  the  hue  of  their  fur,  the 
length  of  their  ears,  the  character  of  their  coat,  and  half 
a  dozen  other  minor  particulars,  well  known  to  the 
observant  souls  of  boys  and  fanciers.  This  great  varia- 
bility, though  partly  perhaps  referable  to  excess  of  food, 
is  probably  due  on  the  whole  to  their  having  been 
raised  under  conditions  of  life  not  so  uniform  as,  and 
somewhat  different  from,  those  to  which  the  parent 
species  is  commonly  exposed  in  a  state  of  nature.  In 
other  words,  variability  is  one  result  of  altered  and  more 
varied  surrounding  circumstances. 

Again,  this  variability  is  usually  indefinite.  You  can- 
not say  what  direction  it  will  take,  or  to  what  particular 
results  it  is  likely  in  any  special  instance  to  lead. 
Marked  difierences  sometimes  occur  even  between  the 
young  of  the  same  litter,  or  between  the  seedlings  sown 
from  the  same  capsule.  As  a  rule,  the  variations 
exhibit  themselves  in  connection  with  sexual  reproduc- 
tion ;  but  sometimes,  as  in  the  case  of  '  sporting  plants,' 
a  new  bud  suddenly  produces  leaves  or  flowers  of  a 
difierent  character  from  the  rest  of  those  on  the  self- 
same stem,  thus  showing  that  the  tendency  to  vary  is 
inherent,  as  it  were,  in  the  organism  itself.     Upon  this 

Origin  of  Species.  The  abstract  is  taken  for  the  most  part  from  the 
latest  and  fullest  enlarged  edition,  but  attention  is  usually  called  in 
passing  to  the  points  which  di^  not  appear  in  the  first  issue  of  1859. 


•  The  Origin  of  Species'  91 

fundamental  fact  of  the  existence  in  nature  of  numerous 
and  indefinite  vai'iations,  the  whole  theory  of  natural 
selection  is  ultimately  built  up.  In  illustrating  by  ex- 
ample the  immense  variability  of  domesticated  creatures, 
Darwin  lays  great  stress  upon  the  case  of  pigeons, 
with  which  he  was  familiar  from  his  long  experience  as 
a  breeder  and  fancier  in  his  own  home  at  Down. 
Naturalists  are  almost  universally  of  opinion  that  all 
the  breeds  of  domestic  pigeons,  from  the  carrier  to  the 
tumbler,  from  the  runt  to  the  fantail,  are  alike  descended 
from  the  wild  rock  pigeon  of  the  European  coasts.  The 
immense  amount  of  variation  which  this  original  species 
has  undergone  in  domestication  may  be  seen  by  com- 
paring the  numberless  breeds  of  pigeon  now  exhibited 
at  all  our  poultry  shows  with  one  another. 

But  variation  gives  us  only  half  the  elements  of 
the  ultimate  problem,  even  in  the  case  of  domestic 
kinds.  For  the  other  half,  we  must  have  recourse  to 
human  selection,  which,  by  picking  out  for  seed  or  breed- 
ing purposes  certain  specially  favoured  varieties,  has  pro- 
duced at  last  all  the  purposive  or  intentional  diversity 
between  the  different  existing  stocks  or  breeds.  In 
these  artificially  produced  domestic  races  we  see  every- 
where special  adaptations  to  man's  particular  use  or 
fancy.  The  dray-horse  has  been  fashioned  for  purposes 
of  strength  and  sure-footedness  in  draught,  the  race- 
horse for  purposes  of  fleetness  in  running.  In  the  fox- 
hound, man  has  encouraged  the  special  properties  that 
tend  to  produce  a  good  day's  hunting ;  in  the  sheep- 
dog, those  that  make  for  the  better  maintenance  and 
safety  of  a  herd.  The  cauliflower  is  a  cabbage,  with 
specialised  and   somewhat   abortive  flower-heads;  the 


92  Charles  Darwin 

fuller's  teasel  is  a  sport  of  the  wild  form,  with  curved 
hooks  specially  adapted  by  a  freak  of  nature  for  the 
teasing  of  wool.  So  in  every  case  man,  by  deliberately 
picking  out  for  breeding  or  seeding  purposes  the  acci- 
dental variations  which  happened  best  to  suit  his  own 
needs,  has  succeeded  at  last  in  producing  races  admirably 
fitted  in  the  minutest  particulars  for  the  special  func- 
tions to  which  they  are  applied.  There  appears  indeed 
to  be  hardly  any  limit  to  the  almost  infinite  plasticity 
and  modifiability  of  domestic  animals.  '  It  would  seem,' 
said  a  great  sheep-breeder,  speaking  of  sheep,  '  as  if 
farmers  had  chalked  out  upon  a  wall  a  form  perfect  in 
itself,  and  then  prpceeded  to  give  it  existence.' 

Now,  what  is  thus  true  within  narrow  limits,  and  in 
a  short  space  of  time  about  the  deliberate  action  of 
man,  Darwin  showed  to  be  also  true  within  wider  limits 
and  spread  over  longer  geological  epochs  about  the  un- 
conscious action  of  nature.  And  herein  consisted  his 
great  advance  upon  the  earlier  evolutionism  of  Lamarck, 
Goethe,  and  Erasmus  Darwin.  For  while  these  instinc- 
tive pioneers  of  the  evolutionary  spirit  saw  clearly  that 
animals  and  plants  betrayed  signs  of  common  descent 
from  one  or  a  tew  original  ancestors,  they  did  not  see 
what  was  the  mechanism  by  which  such  organisms  had 
been  differentiated  into  so  many  distinct  genera  and 
species.  They  caught,  indeed,  at  the  analogy  of  varia- 
tion under  domestication  and  in  the  wild  state,  but  they 
missed  the  subtler  and  deeper  analogy  between  human 
and  natural  selection.  Now,  variation  alone  would  give 
us  a  world  consisting  not  of  definite  kinds  fairly  well 
demarcated  one  from  the  other,  but  of  innumerable  un- 
classified and  unorganisable  individuals,  all  shading  off 


*  The  Origin  of  Species  '  93 

indefinitely  one  into  the  other,  and  incapable  of  being 
reduced  by  human  ingenuity  to  any  orderly  hierarchical 
system.  Furthermore,  it  would  give  tis  creatures  with- 
out special  adaptation  of  any  kind  to  the  peculiar  cir- 
cumstances of  their  own  environment.  To  account  for 
adaptation,  for  the  almost  perfect  fitness  of  every 
plant  and  every  animal  to  its  position  in  life,  for  the 
existence  (in  other  words)  of  definitely  correlated  parts 
and  organs,  we  must  call  in  the  aid  of  survival  of  the 
fittest.  Without  that  potent  selective  agent,  our  con- 
ception of  the  becoming  of  life  is  a  mere  chaos ;  order 
and  organisation  are  utterly  inexplicable  save  by  the 
brilliant  illuminating  ray  of  the  Darwinian  principle. 
That  is  why  Darwin  destroyed  at  one  blow  the  specious 
arguments  of  the  early  teleologists ;  he  showed  that 
where  Chambers  and  even  Erasmus  Darwin  had  seen 
the  working  of  a  final  cause,  we  ought  rather  to  recog- 
nise the  working  of  an  efficient  cause,  whose  outcome 
necessarily  but  fallaciously  simulates  the  supposed  fea- 
tures of  an  a  'priori  finality. 

From  art,  then,  Darwin  harks  back  once  more  to 
nature.  He  proceeds  to  show  that  variability  occurs 
among  all  wild  plants  and  animals,  though  not  so  fre- 
quently under  ordinary  circumstances  as  in  the  case  of 
domesticated  species.  Individual  differences  everywhere 
occur  between  plant  and  plant,  between  animal  and 
animal.  Sometimes  these  differences  are  so  very 
numerous  that  it  is  impossible  to  divide  the  individuals 
at  all  into  well-marked  kinds ;  for  example,  among 
British  wild-roses,  brambles,  hawkweeds  and  epilobes, 
with  a  few  other  very  variable  families,  Babington 
makes  as  many  as  251  distinct  species,  where  Bentham 


94  Charles  Darwin 

gives  only  112 — a  margin  of  139  doubtful  forms  of 
shadowy  indefiniteness.  Varieties,  in  fact,  are  always 
arising,  and  dominant  species  in  particular  always  tend 
to  vary  most  in  every  direction.  The  reason  why  varia- 
tion is  not  so  marked  in  the  wild  state  as  under  domes- 
tication is  of  course  because  the  conditions  are  there 
less  diverse ;  but  where  the  conditions  of  wild  things 
are  most  diverse,  as  in  the  case  of  dominant  kinds, 
which  range  over  a  wide  space  of  country  or  of  ocean, 
abundant  individual  variations  habitually  occur.  Local 
varieties  thus  produced  are  regarded  by  Darwin  as 
incipient  species  :  they  are  the  raw  material  on  which 
natural  selection  gradually  exerts  itself  in  the  struggle 
for  existence. 

Granting  individual  variability,  then,  how  do  species 
arise  in  nature  ?  And  how  are  all  the  exquisite  adapta- 
tions of  part  to  whole,  and  of  whole  to  environment, 
gradually  initiated,  improved,  and  perfected  ? 

Here  Malthus  and  the  struggle  for  life  come  in  to 
help  us. 

For  the  world  is  perpetually  over-populated.  It  is 
not,  as  many  good  people  fearfully  imagine,  on  a  half- 
comprehension  of  the  Malthusian  principle,  shortly 
going  to  be  over-populated;  it  is  now,  it  has  always 
been,  and  it  will  always  be,  pressed  close  up  to  the 
utmost  possible  limit  of  population.  Reproduction  is 
everywhere  and  in  all  species  for  ever  outrunning  means 
of  subsistence;  and  starvation  or  competition  is  for 
ever  keeping  down  the  number  of  the  offspring  to  the 
level  of  the  average  or  nonnal  supply  of  raw  material. 
A  single  red  campion  produces  in  a  year  three  thousand 
seeds ;  but  there  are  not  this  year  three  thousand  times 


^The  Origin  of  Species*  95 

as  many  red  campions  as  there  were  last  summer,  nor 
will  there  be  three  thousand  times  as  many  more  in  the 
succeeding  season.  The  roe  of  a  cod  contains  sometimes 
nearly  ten  million  eggs ;  but  supposing  each  of  these 
produced  a  young  fish  which  arrived  at  maturity,  the 
whole  sea  would  immediately  become  a  solid  mass  of 
closely  packed  codfish.  Linnaeus  reckoned  that  if  an 
annual  plant  had  two  seeds,  each  of  which  produced  two 
seedlings  in  the  succeeding  season,  and  so  on  continually, 
in  twenty  years  their  progeny  would  amount  to  a  million 
plants.  A  struggle  for  existence  necessarily  results 
from  this  universal  tendency  of  animals  and  plants  to 
increase  faster  than  the  means  of  subsistence,  whether 
those  means  be  food,  as  in  the  first  case,  or  carbonic 
acid,  water,  and  sunshine  as  in  the  second.  Animals 
are  all  perpetually  battling  with  one  another  for  the 
food- supply  of  the  moment ;  plants  are  perpetually  bat- 
tling with  one  another  for  their  share  of  the  soil,  the 
rainfall,  and  the  sunshine. 

The  case  of  the  plant  is  a  very  important  one  to 
understand  in  this  connection,  because  it  is  probable 
that  most  people  greatly  misunderstand  the  biological 
meaning  of  the  phrase  '  struggle  for  existence.'  They 
imagine  that  the  struggle  is  chiefly  conducted  between 
different  species,  whereas  in  reality  it  is  chiefly  conducted 
between  members  of  the  same  species.  It  is  not  so 
much  the  battle  between  the  tiger  and  the  antelope, 
between  the  wolf  and  the  bison,  between  the  snake 
and  the  bird,  that  ultimately  results  in  natural  selection 
or  survival  of  the  fittest,  as  the  struggle  between  tiger 
and  tiger,  between  bison  and  bison,  between  snake  and 
snake,   between    antelope    and    antelope.     A    human 


g6  Charles  Darwin 

analogy  may  help  to  make  this  difficalt  principle  a  little 
clearer.  The  baker  does  not  fear  the  competition  of 
the  butcher  in  the  straggle  for  life :  it  is  the  competi- 
tion of  the  other  bakers  that  sometimes  inexorably 
crushes  liim  out  of  existence.  The  lawyer  does  not 
press  hard  upon  the  doctor,  nor  the  architect  upon  the 
journeyman  painter.  A  war  in  the  Soudan  or  in  South 
Africa  is  far  less  fatal  to  the  workman  in  our  great  towns 
than  the  ceaseless  competition  of  his  fellow-workmen. 
It  is  not  the  soldier  that  kills  the  artisan,  but  the  num- 
ber of  other  artisans  who  undersell  him  and  crowd  to 
fill  up  every  vacant  position.  In  this  way  the  great 
enemies  of  the  individual  herbivore  are  not  the  carnivores, 
but  the  other  herbivores.  The  lion  eats  the  antelope, 
to  be  sure ;  but  the  real  struggle  lies  between  lion  and 
lion  for  a  fair  share  of  meat,  or  between  antelope  and 
antelope  for  a  fair  share  of  pasturage.  Homo  homini 
lupus,  says  the  old  proverb,  and  so,  we  may  add,  in  a 
wider  sense,  lupus  lupo  lupus,  also.  Of  course,  the 
carnivore  plays  a  great  part  in  the  selective  process ; 
but  he  is  the  selector  only  ;  the  real  competition  is  be- 
tween the  selected.  Now,  let  us  take  the  case  of  the 
plant.  A  thousand  seedlings  occupy  the  space  where 
few  alone  can  ultimately  grow ;  and  between  these 
seedlings  the  struggle  is  fierce,  the  strongest  and  best 
adapted  ultimately  surviving.  To  take  Darwin's  own 
example,  the  mistletoe,  which  is  a  parasite,  cannot  truly 
be  said  to  struggle  with  the  apple  tree  on  which  it 
fastens ;  for  if  too  many  parasites  cover  a  tree,  it 
perishes,  and  so  they  kill  themselves  as  well  as  their 
host,  all  alike  dying  together.  But  several  seedling 
mistletoes  growing  together  on  the  same  branch  may 


'  The  Origin  op  Species  '  97 

fairly  be  said  to  struggle  with  one  another  for  light  and 
air ;  and  since  mistletoe  seeds  are  disseminated  by  birds 
and  dropped  by  them  in  the  angles  of  branches,  the 
mistletoe  may  also  be  said  to  compete  with  other  berry- 
bearing  bushes,  like  cornel  and  hawthorn,  for  the  minis- 
trations of  the  fruit-eating  birds.  The  struggle  is 
fierce  between  allied  kinds,  and  fiercest  of  all  between 
individual  members  of  the  same  species. 

Owing  to  this  constant  struggle,  variations,  however 
slight,  and  from  whatever  cause  arising,  if  in  any  degree 
profitable  to  the  individual  which  presents  them,  will 
tend  to  the  preservation  of  the  particular  organism,  and, 
being  on  the  average  inherited  by  its  ofispring,  will 
similarly  tend  to  increase  and  multiply  in  the  world  at 
large.  This  is  the  principle  of  natural  selection  or  sur- 
vival of  the  fittest — the  great  principle  which  Darwin 
and  Wallace  added  to  the  evolutionism  of  Lamarck  and 
his  successors. 

Let  us  take  a  single  concrete  example.  In  the 
desert,  with  its  monotonous  sandy  colouring,  a  black 
insect  or  a  white  insect,  still  more  a  red  insect  or  a  blue 
insect,  would  be  immediately  detected  and  promptly  de- 
voured by  its  natural  enemies,  the  birds  and  lizards. 
But  any  greyish  or  yellowith  insects  would  be  less  likely 
to  attract  attention  at  first  sight,  and  would  be  over- 
looked as  long  as  there  were  any  more  conspicuous  in- 
dividuals of  their  own  kind  about  for  the  birds  and 
lizards  to  feed  on  at  their  leisure.  Hence,  in  a  very 
short  time,  the  desert  would  be  depopulated  of  all  but 
the  greyest  and  yellowest  insects  ;  and  among  these  the 
birds  woiild  pick  out  those  which  difiered  most  markedly 
in  hue  or  shade  from  the  sand  around  them.     But  those 


98  Charles  Darwin 

•which  happened  to  vary  most  in  the  direction  of  a  sandy 
or  spotty  colour  would  be  most  likely  to  survive,  and  to 
become  the  parents  of  future  generations.  Thus,  in  the 
course  of  long  ages,  all  the  insects  which  inhabit  deserts 
have  become  sand-coloured ;  because  the  least  sandy 
were  perpetually  picked  out  for  destruction  by  their 
ever-watchful  foes,  while  the  most  sandy  escaped  and 
multiplied  and  replenished  the  earth  with  their  own  likes. 

Conversely,  the  birds  and  the  lizards  again  would 
probably  begin  by  being  black,  and  white,  and  blue,  and 
green,  like  most  other  birds  and  lizards  in  the  world 
generally.  But  the  insect  would  have  ample  warning 
of  the  near  approach  of  such  conspicuous  self-advertising 
enemies,  and  would  avoid  them  accordingly  whenever 
they  appeared  within  range  of  his  limited  vision,  either 
by  lying  close,  or  by  shamming  death,  or  by  retreating 
precipitately  to  holes  and  crannies.  Therefore,  whatever 
individual  birds  or  lizards  happened  to  vary  most  in  the 
direction  of  grey  or  sand- colour,  and  so  to  creep  unob- 
served upon  the  unguarded  insects,  would  succeed  best 
on  the  average  in  catching  beetles  or  desert  grasshoppers. 
Hence,  by  the  slow  dying  out  of  the  more  highly 
coloured  and  distinctive  insect-eaters,  before  the  severe 
competition  of  the  greyest  and  sandiest,  all  the  birds  and 
lizards  of  the  desert  have  become  at  last  as  absolutely 
sand-coloured  as  the  insects  themselves.  Only  the  greyest 
insect  could  escape  the  bird  ;  only  the  greyest  bird,  en 
revanche,  could  surprise  and  devour  the  unwary  insect. 

Sir  Charles  Lyell  and  the  elder  De  Candolle  had 
already  seen  the  great  importance  of  the  struggle  for 
existence  in  the  organic  world,  but  neither  of  them  had 
observed  the  magnificent  corollary  of  natural  selection, 


*  The  Origin  of  Species  '  99 

wliicli  flows  from  it  almost  as  a  mathematical  necessity 
when  once  suggested ;  for,  given  indefinite  variability, 
and  a  geometrical  rate  of  increase,  it  must  needs 
follow  that  some  varieties  will  be  better  suited  to  the 
circumstances  than  others,  and  therefore  that  they  will 
survive  on  the  average  in  increased  proportions.  A 
passage  from  one  of  Lyell's  early  letters  will  show  how 
near  he  too  went  to  this  great  luminous  generalisation, 
and  yet  how  utterly  he  missed  the  true  implications  of 
his  own  vague  and  chaotic  idea.  He  writes  thus  to  Sir 
John  Herschel  in  1836,  while  Darwin  was  still  but 
homeward  bound  on  the  voyage  of  the  '  Beagle ' : — 

'  In  regard  to  the  origination  of  new  species,  I  am 
very  glad  to  find  that  you  think  it  probable  that  it  may 
be  carried  on  through  the  intervention  of  intermediate 
causes.  .  .  .  An  insect  may  be  made  in  one  of  its 
transformations  to  resemble  a  dead  stick,  or  a  leaf,  or  a 
lichen,  or  a  stone,  so  as  to  be  somewhat  less  easily 
found  by  its  enemies;  or  if  this  would  make  it  too 
strong,  an  occasional  variety  of  the  species  may  have 
this  advantage  conferred  on  it ;  or  if  this  would  be  still 
too  much,  one  sex  of  a  certain  variety.  Probably  there 
is  scarcely  a  dash  of  colour  on  the  wing  or  body  of 
which  the  choice  would  be  quite  arbitrary,  or  which 
might  not  afiect  its  duration  for  thousands  of  years.' 

Now,  this  comes  in  some  ways  perilously  near  to 
Darwin  indeed ;  but  in  the  most  impoi  tant  point  of  all 
it  is  wide  apart  from  him  as  the  pole  is  from  the 
equator.  For  Lyell  thought  of  all  this  as  a  matter  of 
external  teleological  arrangement ;  he  imagined  a  de- 
liberate power  from  outside  settling  it  all  by  design 
beforehand,  and  granting  to  varieties  or  species  these 


100  Charles  Darwin 

special  peculiarities  in  a  manner  that  was  at  bottom 
essentially  supernatural,  or  in  other  words  miraculous ; 
whereas  Danvin  thinks  of  it  as  the  necessary  result  of 
the  circumstances  themselves,  an  inevitable  outcome  of 
indefinite  variability  ']^lus  the  geometrical  rate  of  in- 
crease. Where  Lyell  sees  a  final  cause,  Darwin  sees  an 
efficient  cause ;  and  this  distinction  is  fundamental.  It 
marks  Darwin's  position  as  that  of  a  great  philosophi- 
cal thinker,  who  can  dash  aside  at  once  all  metaphysical 
cobwebs,  and  penetrate  to  the  inmost  recesses  of  things, 
unswerved  by  the  vain  but  specious  allurements  of 
obvious  and  misleading  teleological  fallacies. 

Darwin  also  laid  great  stress  on  the  immense  com- 
plexity of  the  relations  which  animals  and  plants  bear 
to  one  another,  in  the  struggle  for  existence.  For 
example,  on  the  heathy  uplands  near  Famham  in 
Surrey,  large  spaces  were  at  one  time  enclosed,  on 
which,  within  ten  years,  self-grown  fir-trees  from  the 
wind-borne  seeds  of  distant  clumps  sprang  up  so 
thickly  as  actually  to  choke  one  another  with  their  tiny 
branches.  All  over  the  heaths  outside,  when  Darwin 
looked  for  them,  he  could  not  find  a  single  fir,  except 
the  old  clumps  on  the  hilltops,  from  which  the  seedlings 
themselves  had  originally  sprung.  But,  on  looking 
closer  among  the  stems  of  the  heath,  he  descried  a 
number  of  very  tiny  firs,  which  had  been  perpetually 
browsed  down  by  the  cattle  on  the  commons ;  and  one 
of  them,  with  twenty-six  riugs  of  growth,  had  during 
many  years  endeavoured  unsuccessfully  to  raise  its 
head  above  the  surrounding  heather.  Hence,  as  soon 
as  the  land  was  enclosed,  and  the  cattle  excluded,  it 
became  covered  at  once  with  a  thick  growth  of  vigorous 


^The  Origin  of  Species*  ioi 

young  fir-trees.  Yet  who  would  ever  have  supposed 
beforehand  that  the  mere  presence  or  absence  of  cattle 
would  absohitely  have  determined  the  very  existence  of 
the  Scotch  fir  throughout  a  wide  range  of  well-adapted 
sandy  English  upland  ? 

To  take  another  curious  instance  mentioned  by 
Darwin.  In  Paraguay,  unlike  the  greater  part  of 
neighbouring  South  America,  neither  horses  nor  cattle 
have  ever  run  wild.  This  is  due  to  the  presence  of  a 
parasitic  fly,  which  lays  its  eggs  in  their  bodies  when  first 
born,  the  maggots  killing  ofi"  the  tender  young  in  their 
first  stages.  But  if  any  cause  were  to  alter  the  number 
of  the  dangerous  flies,  then  cattle  and  wild  horses  would 
abound ;  and  this  would  alter  the  vegetation,  as  Darwin 
himself  observed  in  other  parts  of  America ;  and  the 
change  in  the  vegetation  would  aSect  the  insects  ;  and 
that  again  the  insectivorous  birds  ;  and  so  on  in  ever 
widening  circles  of  incalculable  complexity.  Once 
more,  to  quote  the  most  famous  instance  of  all,  the 
visits  of  humble-bees  are  absolutely  necessary  in  order 
to  place  the  pollen  in  the  right  position  for  setting  the 
seeds  of  purple  clover.  Heads  from  which  Darwin 
excluded  the  bees  produced  no  seeds  at  all.  Hence,  if 
humble-bees  became  extinct  in  England,  the  red  clover, 
too,  would  die  ofi":  and  indeed,  in  New  Zealand,  where 
there  are  no  humble-bees,  and  where  the  eSbrts  to 
introduce  them  for  tliis  very  purpose  have  been  uni- 
formly unsuccessful,  the  clover  never  sets  its  seed  at 
all,  and  fresh  stocks  have  to  be  imported  at  great  ex- 
pense every  year  from  Europe.  But  the  number  of 
humble-bees  in  any  district  largely  depends  upon  the 
number  of  field-mice,  which  destroy  the  combs  and 
10 


102  Charles  Darwin 

nests  in  immense  quantities.  The  number  of  mice, 
again,  is  greatly  affected  by  the  proportion  of  cats  in 
the  neighbourhood ;  so  that  Colonel  Newman,  who  paid 
much  attention  to  this  subject,  found  humble-bees  most 
numerous  in  the  neighbourhood  of  villages  and  small 
towns,  an  effect  which  he  attributed  to  the  abundance 
of  cats,  and  the  consequent  scarcity  of  the  destructive 
field-mice.  Yet  here  once  more,  who  could  suppose 
beforehand  that  the  degi-ee  to  which  the  purple  clover 
set  its  seeds  was  in  part  determined  by  the  number  of 
cats  kept  in  houses  in  the  surrounding  district  ? 

One  of  Darwin's  own  favourite  examples  of  the 
action  of  natural  selection,  which  he  afterwards  ex- 
panded largely  in  his  work  on  Orchids  and  in  several 
other  volumes,  is  that  which  relates  to  the  origin  of 
conspicuous  flowers.  Many  plants  have  a  sweet  excre- 
tion, which  is  eliminated  sometimes  even  by  the  leaves, 
as  in  the  case  of  the  common  laurel.  This  juice,  though 
small  in  quantity,  is  eagerly  sought  and  eaten  by  insects. 
Now  let  us  suppose  that,  in  some  variety  of  an  incon- 
spicuous flower,  similar  nectar  was  produced  in  the 
neighbourhood  of  the  petals  and  stamens.  Insects,  in 
seeking  the  nectar,  would  dust  their  bodies  over  with 
the  pollen,  and  would  carry  it  away  with  them  to  the 
next  flower  visited.  This  would  result  in  an  act  of 
crossing  ;  and  that  act,  as  Darwin  afterwards  abundantly 
proved  in  a  separate  and  very  laborious  treatise,  gives 
rise  to  excepiionally  vigorous  seedlings,  which  would 
therefore  have  the  best  chance  of  flourishing  and  sur- 
viving in  the  struggle  for  existence.  The  flowers  which 
produced  most  honey  would  oftenest  be  visited,  and 
oftenest  crossed ;  so  that  they  would  finally  form  a  new 


^The  Origin  of  Species*  103 

species.  The  more  brightly  coloured  <ainong  them, 
again,  would  be  more  readily  discriminated  than  the 
less  brightly  coloured  ;  and  this  would  give  them  such 
an  advantage  that  in  the  long  run,  as  we  actually  see, 
almost  all  habitually  insect-fertilised  flowers  would  come 
to  have  brilliant  petals.  The  germ  of  this  luminous 
idea,  once  more,  is  to  be  found  in  Sprengel's  remarkable 
work  on  the  fertilisation  of  flowers — a  work  far  in 
advance  of  its  time  in  many  ways,  and  to  whichi  Darwin 
always  expressed  his  deep  obligations;  but,  as  in  so 
many  other  instances,  while  Sprengel  looked  upon  all 
the  little  modifications  and  adaptations  of  flower  and 
insect  to  one  another  as  the  result  of  distinct  creative 
design,  Darwin  looked  upon  them  as  the  result  of 
natural  selection,  working  upon  the  basis  of  indeter- 
minate spontaneous  variations. 

How  do  these  variations  arise  ?  Not  by  chance,  of 
course  (for  in  the  strict  scientific  sense  nothing  on  earth 
can  be  considered  as  really  fortuitous),  but  as  the  out- 
come for  the  most  part  of  very  minute  organic  causes, 
whose  particular  action  it  is  impossible  for  us  to  predict 
with  our  present  knowledge.  Some  physical  cause  in 
each  case  there  must  necessarily  be ;  and  indeed  it  is 
often  possible  to  show  that  certain  changes  of  condition 
in  the  parent  do  result  in  variations  in  the  oflTspring, 
though  what  special  direction  the  variation  will  take 
can  never  be  foretold  with  any  accuracy.  In  short,  our 
ignorance  of  the  laws  of  variation  is  profound,  but  our 
knowledge  of  the  fact  is  clear  and  certain.  The  fact 
alone  is  essential  to  the  principle  of  natural  selection ; 
the  cause,  though  in  itself  an  interesting  subject  of 
inquiry,  may  be  safely  laid  aside  for  the  present  as  com- 


I04  Charles  Darwin 

paratively  unimportant.  What  we  have  actually  given 
to  us  in  the  concrete  universe  is,  organisms  varying 
perpetually  in  minute  points,  and  a  rapid  rate  of  in- 
crease causing  every  minute  point  of  advantage  to  be 
exceptionally  favoured  in  the  struggle  for  existence. 

But  Darwin  is  remarkable  among  all  broachers  of 
new  theories  for  the  extraordinary  candour  and  open- 
ness of  his  method.  He  acknowledged  beforehand  all 
the  difficulties  in  the  way  of  his  theory,  and  though  he 
himself  confessed  that  some  of  them  were  serious  (a 
statement  which  subsequent  research  has  often  rendered 
unnecessary),  he  met  many  of  them  with  cogent  argu- 
ments by  anticipation,  and  demolished  objections  before 
they  could  even  be  raised  against  him  by  hostile  critics. 
Of  these  objections,  only  two  need  here  be  mentioned. 
The  first  is  the  question,  why  is  not  all  nature  even  now 
a  confused  mass  of  transitional  forms  ?  Why  do  genera 
and  species  exist  as  we  see  them  at  present  in  broad 
distinction  one  from  the  other?  To  this  Darwin 
answers  rightly  that,  where  the  process  of  species- 
maldng  is  still  going  on,  we  do  actually  find  fine  grada- 
tions and  transitional  forms  existing  between  genera, 
vaiieties,  and  species.'  But,  furthermore,  as  natural 
selection  acts  solely  by  the  preservation  of  useful  modi- 
fications, each  better-adapted  new  form  will  always  tend 
in  a  fully  stocked  country  to  oust  and  exterminate  its 
own  unimproved  parent  type,  as  well  as  all  other 
competing  but  less  perfect  varieties.  Thus  natural 
selection  and  extinction  of  intermediates  go  for  ever 

'  The  researches  of  Seebohm  and  others  have  since  proved  that 
this  is  really  the  case  to  a  far  greater  extent  than  Darvvin  was  aware 
of  in  1859,  or,  indeed,  till  many  years  afterward. 


*  The  Origin  of  Species*  105 

hand  in  hand.  The  more  perfect  the  new  variety,  the 
more  absolutely  will  it  kill  off  the  intermediate  forms. 
The  second  great  difficulty  lies  in  the  question  of  the 
origin  of  instinct,  which,  as  Darwin  shows,  by  careful 
inductive  instances,  may  have  arisen  by  the  slow  and 
gradual  accumulation  of  numerous  slight  yet  profitable 
variations. 

I  have  dwelt  at  some  length  upon  those  portions  of 
the  '  Origin  of  Species '  which  deal  in  detail  with  the 
theory  of  natural  selection,  the  chief  contribution  which 
Darwin  made  to  the  evolutionary  movement,  because  it 
is  impossible  otherwise  fully  to  understand  the  great 
gulf  which  separates  his  evolutionism  from  the  earlier 
evolutionism  of  Lamarck  and  his  followers.  But  it  is 
impracticable  here  to  give  any  idea  of  the  immense  wealth 
of  example  and  illustration  which  Darwin  brought  to 
the  elucidation  of  every  part  of  his  complex  problem. 
In  order  to  gain  a  full  conception  of  this  side  of  his 
nature,  we  must  turn  to  the  original  treatise  itself,  and 
still  more  to  the  subsequent  volumes  in  which  the 
ground-work  of  observations  and  experiments  on  which 
he  based  his  theory  was  more  fully  detailed  for  the 
specialist  public. 

The  remainder  of  Darwin's  epoch-making  work  deals, 
strictly  speaking,  rather  with  the  general  theory  of 
'  descent  with  modification '  than  with  the  special  doc- 
trine of  natural  selection.  It  restates  and  reinforces, 
by  the  light  of  the  new  additional  concept,  and  with 
fuller  facts  and  later  knowledge,  the  four  great  argu- 
ments already  known  in  favour  of  organic  evolution  as 
a  whole,  the  argument  from  Geological  Succession,  the 
argument  from  Geographical  Distribution,  the  argument 


io6  Charles  DARwm 

from  Embryological  Development,  and  the  argument 
from  Classificatoiy  Affinities.  Each  of  these  we  may 
briefly  summarise. 

The  geological  record  is  confessedly  imperfect.  At 
the  time  when  Darwin  first  published  the  '  Origin  of 
Species,'  it  had  disclosed  to  our  view  comparatively  few 
intermediate  or  transitional  forms  between  the  chief 
great  classes  of  plants  or  animals ;  since  that  time,  in 
singular  confirmation  of  the  Darwinian  hypothesis,  it 
has  disclosed  an  immense  number  of  such  connecting 
types,  amongst  which  may  be  more  particularly  noticed 
the  '  missing  links '  between  the  birds  and  reptiles,  the 
ancestors  of  the  horses,  the  camels,  and  the  pigs,  and 
the  common  progenitor  of  the  ruminants  and  the 
pachyderms,  two  great  groups  classed  by  Cuvier  as 
distinct  orders — all  of  which  instances  were  incorporated 
by  Darwin  in  later  editions  of  his  '  Origin  of  Species.' 
But,  apart  from  these  special  and  newly  discovered  cases, 
the  whole  general  course  of  geological  history  '  agrees 
admirably  with  the  theory  of  descent  with  modification 
through  variation  and  natural  selection.'  The  simpler 
animals  of  early  times  are  followed  by  the  more  complex 
and  more  specialised  animals  of  later  geological  periods. 
As  each  main  group  of  animals  appears  upon  the  stage 
of  life,  it  appears  in  a  very  central  and  '  generalised ' 
form ;  as  time  goes  on,  we  find  its  various  members 
differing  more  and  more  widely  from  one  another,  and 
assuming  more  and  more  specialised  adaptive  forms. 
And  in  each  country  it  is  found,  as  a  rule,  that  the 
extinct  animals  of  the  later  formations  bear  a  close 
general  resemblance  and  relationship  to  the  animals 
which  now   inhabit  the  same  regions.     For  example, 


•  The  Origin  of  Species*  107 

the  fossil  mammals  from  tlie  Australian  caves  are  nearly 
allied  to  the  modern  kangaroos,  phalangers,  and  wom- 
bats; and  the  gigantic  extinct  sloths  and  armadillos 
of  South  America  are  reproduced  in  their  smaller  repre- 
sentatives at  the  present  day.  So,  too,  the  moa  of 
New  Zealand  was  a  huge  apteryx ;  and  the  birds  dis- 
entombed from  the  bone-caves  of  Brazil  show  close 
affinities  to  the  toucans  and  jacanars  that  still  scream 
and  flit  in  countless  flocks  among  Brazilian  forests. 
The  obvious  implication  is  that  the  animals  now  in- 
habiting any  given  area  are  the  modified  descendants 
of  those  that  formerly  inhabited  it.  '  On  the  theory 
of  descent  with  modification,  the  great  law  of  the  suc- 
cession of  the  same  types  within  the  same  areas  is  at 
once  explained.' 

This  last  consideration  leads  us  up  to  the  argument 
from  Geographical  Distribution.  In  considering  the 
various  local  faunas  and  floras  on  the  face  of  the  globe, 
no  point  strikes  one  more  forcibly  than  the  fact  that 
neither  their  similarities  nor  their  dissimilarities  can  be 
accounted  for  by  climate  or  physical  conditions.  The 
animals  of  South  Africa  do  not  in  the  least  resemble 
the  animals  of  the  corresponding  belt  of  South  America; 
the  Australian  beasts  and  birds  and  trees  are  utterly 
unlike  those  of  France  and  Germany;  the  fishes  and 
crustaceans  of  the  Pacific  at  Panama  are  widely  different 
from  those  of  the  Caribbean  at  the  same  point,  sepa- 
rated from  them  only  by  the  narrow  belt  of  intervening 
isthmus.  On  the  other  hand,  within  the  same  con- 
tinuous areas  of  sea  or  land,  however  great  the  differ- 
ences of  physical  conditions,  we  find  everywhere  closely 
related   types  in  possession  of  the  most  distinct  and 


io8  Charles  Darwin 

varied  situations.  On  the  burning  plains  of  La  Plata 
we  get  the  agouti  and  the  bizcacha  as  the  chief  rodents'; 
we  ascend  the  Cordillera,  and  close  to  the  eternal  snows 
we  discover,  not  hares  and  rabbits  like  those  of  Europe, 
but  a  specialised  chillj  mountain  form  of  the  same 
distinctly  South  American  type.  We  turn  to  the 
rivers,  and  we  see  no  musk-rat  or  beaver,  but  the 
coypu  and  capybara,  slightly  altered  varieties  of  the 
original  bizcacha  ancestor.  Australia  has  no  wolf,  but 
it  has  instead  fierce  and  active  carnivorous  marsupials ; 
it  has  no  mice,  but  some  of  its  tiny  kangaroo-like 
creatures  fulfil  analogous  functions  in  its  animal 
economy.  Everywhere  the  evidence  points  to  the  con- 
clusion that  local  species  have  been  locally  evolved  from 
pre-existing  similar  species.  The  oceanic  isles,  of  which 
Darwin  had  had  so  large  an  experience,  and  especially 
his  old  friends  the  Galapagos,  come  in  usefully  for  this 
stage  of  the  question.  They  are  invariably  inhabited, 
as  Darwin  pointed  out,  and  as  Wallace  has  since 
abundantly  shown  in  the  minutest  detail,  by  waifs 
and  strays  from  neighbouring  continents,  altered  and 
specialised  by  natural  selection  in  accordance  with  the 
conditions  of  their  new  habitat.  As  a  rule,  they  point 
back  to  the  districts  whence  blow  the  strongest  and 
most  prevalent  winds ;  and  the  modifications  they  have 
undergone  are  largely  dependent  upon  the  nature  of 
the  other  species  with  which  they  have  to  compete,  or 
to  whose  habits  they  must  needs  accommodate  them- 
selves. In  such  cases  it  is  easy  to  see  how  far  Darwin's 
special  conception  of  natural  selection  helps  to  explain 
and  account  for  facts  not  easily  explicable  by  the  older 
evolutionism  of  mere  descent  with  modification. 


*  The  Origin  of  Species  '  109 

Embryology,  the  study  of  early  development  in  the 
individual  animal  or  plant,  also  throws  much  side  light 
upon  the  nature  and  ancestry  of  each  species  or  family. 
For  example,  gorse,  which  is  a  member  of  the  pea- 
flower  tribe,  has  in  its  adult  stage  solid,  spiny,  thorn-like 
leaves,  none  of  which  in  the  least  resemble  the  foliage 
of  the  clover,  to  which  it  is  closely  related ;  but  the 
young  seedling  in  its  earliest  stages  has  trefoil  leaves, 
which  only  slowly  pass  by  infinitesimal  gradations  into 
flat  blades  and  finally  into  the  familiar  defensive 
prickles.  Here,  natural  selection  under  stress  of 
herbivorous  animals  on  open  heaths  and  commons  has 
spared  only  those  particular  gorse-bushes  which  varied 
in  the  direction  of  the  stiffest  and  most  inedible 
foliage  ;  but  the  young  plant  in  its  first  days  still  pre- 
serves for  us  the  trefoil  leaf  which  it  shared  originally 
with  a  vast  group  of  clover-like  congeners.  The  adult 
barnacle,  once  more,  presents  a  certain  fallacious  ex- 
ternal resemblance  to  a  mollusk,  and  was  actually  so 
classed  even  by  the  penetrating  and  systematic  intellect 
of  Cuvier ;  but  a  glance  at  the  larva  shows  an  instructed 
eye  at  once  that  it  is  really  a  shell-making  and  abnormal 
crustacean.  On  a  wider  scale,  the  embryos  of  mammals 
are  at  first  indistinguishable  from  those  of  birds  or 
reptiles ;  the  feet  of  lizards,  the  hoofs  of  horses,  the 
hands  of  man,  the  wings  of  the  bat,  the  pinions  of 
birds,  all  arise  from  the  same  fundamental  shapeless 
bud,  in  the  same  spot  of  an  almost  identical  embryo. 
Even  the  human  foetus,  at  a  certain  stage  of  its  develop- 
ment, is  provided  with  gill-slits,  which  point  dimly  back 
to  the  remote  ages  when  its  ancestor  was  something 
very  like  a  fish.     The  embryo  is  a  picture,  more  or  less 


no  Charles  Darwin 

obscured  and  blurred  in  its  outline,  of  the   common 
progenitor  of  a  whole  great  class  of  plants  or  animals. 

Finally,  classification  points  in  the  same  way  to  the 
afiiliation  of  all  existing  genera  and  species  upon  certain 
early  divergent  ancestors.  The  whole  scheme  of  the 
biological  system,  as  initiated  by  Linngeus  and  improved 
by  Cuvier,  Jussieu,  De  Oandolle,  and  their  successors, 
is  essentially  that  of  a  genealogical  tree.  The  prime 
centi-al  vertebrate  ancestor — to  take  the  case  of  the 
creatures  most  familiar  to  the  general  reader — appears 
to  have  been  an  animal  not  unlike  the  existing  lancelet, 
a  mud-haunting,  cartilaginous,  undeveloped  fish,  whose 
main  lineaments  are  also  embryologically  preserved  for 
us  in  the  ascidian  larva  and  the  common  tadpole. 
From  this  early  common  centre  have  been  developed, 
apparently,  in  one  direction  the  fishes,  and  in  another 
the  amphibian  tribes  of  frogs,  newts,  salamanders,  and 
axolotls.  From  an  early  amphibian,  again,  the  common 
ancestor  of  birds,  reptiles,  and  mammals  seems  to  have 
diverged :  the  intermediate  links  between  bird  and 
reptile  being  faintly  traced  among  the  extinct  deino- 
saurians  and  the  archaeopteryx,  some  years  subsequently 
to  the  first  appearance  of  the  '  Origin  of  Species  ; '  while 
the  ornithorhyncus,  which  to  some  extent  connects  the 
mammals,  and  especially  the  marsupials,  with  the  lower 
egg-laying  types  of  vertebrate,  was  already  well-known 
and  thoroughly  studied  before  the  publication  of 
Darwin's  great  work.  Throughout,  the  indications 
given  by  all  the  chief  tribes  of  animals  and  plants  point 
back  to  slow  descent  and  divergence  from  common 
ancestors ;  and  all  the  subsequent  course  of  paleeonto- 
logical    research   has   supplied   us   rapidly,   one    after 


*  The  Origin  of  Species  '  1 1 1 

anotter,  with  the  remains  of  just  such  undifferentiated 
family  starting-points. 

Stress  has  mainly  been  laid,  in  this  brief  and  neces- 
sarily imperfect  abstract,  on  the  essentially  Darwinian 
principle  of  natural  selection.  But  Darwin  did  not 
himself  attribute  everything  to  this  potent  factor  in  the 
moulding  of  species.  'I  am  convinced,'  he  wrote 
pointedly  in  the  introduction  to  his  first  edition,  *  that 
natural  selection  has  been  the  main  but  not  the  exclusive 
means  of  modification.'  He  attributed  considerable 
importance  as  well  to  the  Lamarckian  principle  of  use 
and  disuse,  already  so  fully  insisted  upon  before  him  by 
Mr.  Herbert  Spencer.  The  chief  factors  in  his  compound 
theory,  as  given  in  his  own  words  at  the  end  of  his  work, 
areas  follows  :  '  Growth  with  Reproduction ;  Inheritance, 
which  is  almost  implied  by  reproduction ;  Variability, 
from  the  indirect  and  direct  action  of  the  conditions  of 
life,  and  from  use  and  disuse ;  a  Ratio  of  Increase,  so 
high  as  to  lead  to  a  Struggle  for  Life,  and  as  a  conse- 
quence to  Natural  Selection,  entailing  Divergence  of 
Character,  and  the  Extinction  of  the  less  improved 
forms.  Thus,  from  the  war  of  nature,  from  famine  and 
death,  the  most  exalted  object  which  we  are  capable  of 
conceiving,  namely,  the  production  of  the  higher 
animals,  directly  follows.' 

Such  was  the  simple  and  inoffensive-looking  bomb- 
shell which  Darwin  launched  from  his  quiet  home  at 
Down  into  the  very  midst  of  the  teleological  camp  in 
the  peaceful  year  1859.  Subsequent  generations  will 
remember  the  date  as  a  crisis  and  turning-point  in  the 
history  of  mankind. 


112  Charles  Darwin 


CHAPTER  vn. 

THE  DARWINIAN   REVOLUTION  BEGINS., 

So  far  as  the  scientific  world  was  concerned  the  *  Origin 
of  Species '  fell,  like  a  grain  of  mustard  seed,  upon 
good  and  well-prepared  ground ;  the  plant  that  sprang 
from  it  grew  up  forthwith  into  a  great  and  stately  tree, 
that  overshadowed  with  its  spreading  branches  all  the 
comers  of  the  earth. 

The  soil,  indeed,  had  been  carefully  broken  for  it 
beforehand :  Lamarck  and  St.  Hilaire,  Spencer  and 
Chambers,  had  ploughed  and  harrowed  in  all  diligence ; 
and  the  minds  of  men  were  thoroughly  ready  for  the 
assimilation  of  the  new  doctrine.  But  the  seed  itself, 
too,  was  the  right  germ  for  the  exact  moment ;  it  con- 
tained within  itself  the  vivifying  principle  that  enabled 
it  to  grow  and  wax  exceeding  great  where  kindred 
germs  before  had  withered  away,  or  had  borne  but 
scanty  and  immature  fruit. 

Two  conditions  contributed  to  this  result,  one  ex- 
ternal, the  other  internal. 

First  for  the  less  important  external  consideration. 
Darwin  himself  was  a  sound  man  with  an  established 
reputation  for  solidity  and  learning.  That  gained  for 
his  theory  from  the  very  first  outset  universal  respect 


The  Darwinian  Revolution  Begins     113 

and  a  fair  hearing.  Herbert  Spencer  was  known  to  be 
a  pliilosoplier :  and  the  practical  English  nation  mis- 
trusts philosophers :  those  people  probe  too  deep  and  soar 
too  high  for  any  sensible  person  to  follow  them  in  all 
their  flights.  Robert  Chambers,  the  unknown  author  of 
'  Vestiges  of  Creation,'  was  a  shallow  sciolist ;  it  was 
whispered  abroad  that  he  was  even  inaccurate  and 
slovenly  in  his  facts :  and  your  scientific  plodder  detests 
the  very  shadow  of  minute  inaccuracy,  though  it  speak 
with  the  tongues  of  men  and  angels,  and  be  bound  up 
with  all  the  grasp  and  power  of  a  Newton  or  a  Goethe. 
But  Charles  Darwin  was  a  known  personage,  an  F.R.S., 
a  distinguished  authority  upon  coral  reefs  and  barnacles, 
a  great  geologist,  a  great  biologist,  a  great  observer  and 
indefatigable  collector.  His  book  came  into  the  public 
hands  stamped  with  the  imprimatur  of  official  recogni- 
tion. Darwin  was  the  father  of  the  infant  theory ; 
Lyell  and  Hooker  stood  for  its  sponsors.  The  world 
could  not  afford  to  despise  its  contents  ;  they  could  not 
brand  its  author  ofi'hand  as  a  clever  dreamer  or  a  foolish 
amateur,  or  consign  him  to  the  dreaded  English  limbo 
of  the  '  mere  theorist.' 

Next,  for  the  other  and  far  more  important  internal 
consideration.  The  book  itself  was  one  of  the  greatest, 
the  most  learned,  the  most  lucid,  the  most  logical,  the 
most  crushing,  the  most  conclusive,  that  the  world  had 
ever  yet  seen.  Step  by  step,  and  principle  by  principle, 
it  proved  every  point  in  its  progress  triumphantly 
before  it  went  on  to  demonstrate  the  next.  So  vast  an 
array  of  facts  so  thoroughly  in  hand  had  never  before 
been  mustered  and  marshalled  in  favour  of  any  bio- 
logical theory.  Those  who  had  insight  to  learn  and 
11 


114  Charles  Darwin 

understand  were  convinced  at  once  by  the  cogency  of 
the  argument;  those  who  had  not  were  overpowered 
and  silenced  by  the  weight  of  the  authority  and  the 
mass  of  the  learning.  A  hot  battle  burst  forth  at  once, 
no  doubt,  around  the  successful  volume ;  but  it  was  one 
of  those  battles  which  are  aroused  only  by  great  truths, 
—  a  battle  in  which  the  victory  is  a  foregone  conclusion, 
and  the  rancour  of  the  assailants  the  highest  compliment 
to  the  prowess  of  the  assailed. 

Darwin  himself,  in  his  quiet  country  home  at  Down, 
was  simply  astonished  at  the  rapid  success  of  his  own 
work.  The  first  edition  was  published  at  the  end  of 
November  1859;  it  was  exhausted  almost  immediately, 
and  a  second  was  got  ready  in  hot  haste  by  the  beginning 
of  January  1860.  In  less  than  six  weeks  the  book  had 
become  famous,  and  Darwin  found  himself  the  centre  of 
a  European  contest,  waged  with  exceeding  bitterness, 
over  the  truth  or  falsity  of  liis  wonderful  volume.  To  the 
world  at  large  Darwinism  and  evolution  became  at  once 
synonymous  terms.  The  same  people  who  would  entirely 
ascribe  the  Protestant  Reformation  to  the  account  of 
Luther,  and  the  inductive  philosophy  to  the  account  of 
Bacon,  also  believed,  in  the  simplicity  of  their  hearts,  that 
the  whole  vast  evolutionary  movement  was  due  at  bottom 
to  that  very  insidious  and  dangerous  book  of  Mr.  Darwin's. 

The  fact  is,  profound  as  had  been  the  impulses  in 
the  evolutionary  direction  among  men  of  science  before 
Darwin's  work  appeared  at  all,  immense  as  were  the 
throes  and  pangs  of  labour  throughout  all  Europe  which 
preceded  and  accompanied  its  actual  birth,  when  it 
came  at  last  it  came  to  the  general  world  of  unscientific 
readers  with  all  the  sudden  vividness  and  novelty  of  a 


The  Darwinian  Revolution  Begins     115 

tremendous  earthquake.  Long  predestined,  it  was  yet 
wholly  unexpected.  Men  at  large  had  known  nothing  or 
next  to  nothing  of  this  colossal  but  hidden  revolutionary 
force  which  had  been  gathering  head  and  energy  for  so 
many  years  unseen  within  the  bowels  of  the  earth ;  and 
now  that  its  outer  manifestation  had  actually  burst 
upon  them,  they  felt  the  solid  ground  of  dogmatic 
security  bodily  giving  way  beneath  their  feet,  and  knew 
not  where  to  turn  in  their  extremity  for  support. 
Naturally,  it  was  the  theological  interest  that  felt  itself 
at  first  most  forcibly  assailed.  The  first  few  chapters  of 
Genesis,  or  rather  the  belief  in  their  scientific  and  his- 
torical character,  already  sapped  by  the  revelations  of 
geology,  seemed  to  orthodox  defenders  to  be  fatally 
undermined  if  the  Darwinian  hypothesis  were  once 
to  meet  with  general  recognition.  The  first  resource 
of  menaced  orthodoxy  is  always  to  deny  the  alleged 
facts ;  the  second  is  to  patch  up  tardily  the  feeble 
and  hollow  modus  vivendi  of  an  artificial  pact.  On 
this  occasion  the  orthodox  acted  strictly  after  their 
kind :  but  to  their  credit  it  should  be  added  that  they 
yielded  gracefully  in  the  long  run  to  the  unanimous 
voice  of  scientific  opinion.  Twenty-three  years  later, 
when  all  that  was  mortal  of  Charles  Darwin  was  being 
borne  with  pomp  and  pageantry  to  its  last  resting- 
place  in  Westminster  Abbey,  enlightened  orthodoxy, 
with  generous  oblivion,  ratified  a  truce  over  the  dead 
body  of  the  great  leader,  and,  outgrowing  its  original 
dread  of  naturalistic  interpretations,  accepted  his  theory 
without  reserve  as  '  not  necessarily  hostile  to  the  main 
fundamental  truths  of  religion.'  Let  us  render  justice 
to  the  vanquished  in  a  memorable  struggle.   Churchmen 


ii6  Charles  Darwin 

followed  respectfully  to  the  grave  with  frank  and  noble 
inconsistency  the  honoured  remains  of  the  very  teacher 
whom  less  than  a  quarter  of  a  century  earlier  they  had 
naturally  dreaded  as  loosening  the  ti-aditional  foundations 
of  all  accepted  religion  and  morality. 

But  if  the  attack  was  fierce  and  bitter,  the  defence 
was  assisted  by  a  sudden  access  of  powerful  forces  from 
friendly  quarters.  A  few  of  the  elder  generation  of 
naturalists  held  out,  indeed,  for  various  shorter  or  longer 
periods ;  some  of  them  never  came  into  the  camp  at  all, 
but  lingered  on,  left  behind,  like  stragglers  from  the 
onward  march,  by  the  younger  biologists,  in  isolated  non- 
conformity on  the  lonely  heights  of  austere  officialism. 
Their  business  was  to  ticket  and  docket  and  pigeon-hole, 
not  to  venture  abroad  on  untried  wings  into  the  airy 
regions  of  philosophical  speculation.  The  elder  men, 
in  fact,  had  many  of  them  lost  that  elasticity  and  modi- 
fiability  of  intellect  which  is  necessary  for  the  reception 
of  new  and  revolutionary  fundamental  concepts.  A  mind 
that  has  hardened  down  into  the  last  stage  of  extreme 
maturity  may  assimilate  fresh  facts  and  fresh  minor  ■ 
principles,  but  it  cannot  assimilate  fresh  synthetic  sys- 
tems of  the  entire  cosmos.  Moreover,  some  of  the  elder 
thinkers  were  committed  beforehand  to  opposing  views, 
with  which  they  lacked  either  the  courage  or  the  in- 
tellectual power  to  break ;  while  others  were  entangled 
by  religious  restrictions,  and  unable  to  free  themselves 
from  the  cramping  fetters  of  a  narrow  orthodoxy. 
But  even  among  his  own  contemporaries  and  seniors 
Darwin  found  not  a  few  whose  minds  were  thoroughly 
prepared  beforehand  for  the  reception  of  his  lucid 
and  luminous  hypothesis;  while  the  younger  natural- 


The  Darwinian  Revolution  Begins      117 

ists,  with  the  plasticity  of  youth,  assimilated  almost 
to  a  man,  with  the  utmost  avidity,  the  great  truths 
thus  showered  down  upon  them  by  the  preacher  of 
evolution. 

Sir  Joseph  Hooker  and  Professor  Huxley  were  among 
the  first  to  give  in  their  adhesion  and  stand  up  boldly 
for  the  new  truth  by  the  side  of  the  reckless  and  dis- 
turbing innovator.  In  June  1859,  nearly  a  year  after 
the  reading  of  the  Darwin- Wall  ace  papers  at  the  Linnean 
Society,  but  five  months  previously  to  the  publication 
of  the  '  Origin  of  Species,'  Huxley  lectured  at  the  Royal 
Institution  on  '  Persistent  Types  of  Animal  Life,'  and 
declared  against  the  old  barren  theory  of  successive 
creations,  in  favour  of  the  new  and  fruitful  hypothesis 
of  gradual  modification.  In  December  1859,  a  month 
later  than  the  appearance  of  Darwin's  book.  Hooker 
published  his  '  Introduction  to  the  I'lora  of  Australia,' 
in  the  first  part  of  which  he  championed  the  belief  in 
the  descent  and  modification  of  species,  and  enforced 
his  views  by  many  original  observations  drawn  from  the 
domain  of  botanical  science.  For  fifteen  years,  as  Darwin 
himself  gratefully  observed  in  his  introduction  to  the 
'  Origin  of  Species,'  that  learned  botanist  had  shared 
the  secret  of  natural  selection,  and  aided  its  author  in 
every  possible  way  by  his  large  stores  of  knowledge 
and  his  excellent  judgment.  Bates,  the  naturalist  on 
the  Amazons,  followed  fast  with  his  beautiful  and  striking 
theory  of  mimicry,  a  crucial  instance  well  explained. 
The  facts  of  the  strange  disguises  which  birds  and 
insects  often  assume  had  long  been  present  to  his  acute 
mind,  and  he  hailed  with  delight  the  disco*^ery  of  the 
new  principle,  which  at  once  enabled   him  to  reduce 


ii8  Charles  Darwin 

them  witli  ease  to  symmetry  and  order.  To  Herbert 
Spencer,  an  evolutionist  in  fibre  from  the  very  beginning, 
the  fresh  doctrine  of  natural  selection  came  like  a  power- 
ful ally  and  an  unexpected  assistant  in  deciphering  the 
deep  fundamental  problems  on  which  he  was  at  that 
moment  actually  engaged;  and  in  his  'Principles  of 
Biology,'  even  then  in  contemplation,  he  at  once  adopted 
and  utilised  the  new  truth  with  all  the  keen  and  vigorous 
insight  of  his  profound  analytic  and  synthetic  intellect. 
The  first  part  of  that  important  work  was  issued  to 
subscribers  just  three  years  after  the  original  appearance 
of  the  '  Origin  of  Species ; '  the  first  volume  was  fully 
completed  in  October  1864.  It  is  to  Mr.  Spencer  that 
we  owe  the  pellucid  expression  '  survival  of  the  fittest,' 
which  conveys  even  better  than  Darwin's  own  phrase, 
'  natural  selection,'  the  essential  element  added  by  the 
'  Origin  of  Species '  to  the  pre-existing  evolutionary 
conception. 

The  British  Association  for  the  Advancement  of 
Science  held  its  big  annual  doctrinaire  picnic  the  next 
summer  after  the  publication  of  Darwin's  book,  at 
Oxford.  The  Oxford  meeting  was  a  stormy  and  a  well- 
remembered  one.  The  '  Origin  of  Species '  was  there 
discussed  and  attacked  before  a  biological  section 
strangely  enough  presided  over  by  Darwin's  old 
Cambridge  teacher,  Professor  Henslow.  Though  then 
a  beneficed  parish  priest,  Henslow  had  the  boldness 
frankly  to  avow  his  own  acceptance  of  his  great  pupil's 
startling  conclusions.  Huxley  followed  in  the  same 
path,  as  did  also  Lubbock  and  Hooker.  On  the  whole, 
the  evolutionists  were  already  in  the  ascendant ;  the 
fresh  young  intellects  especially  being  quick  to  seize 


The  Darwinian  Revolution  Begins      119 

npon  the  new  pabulum  so  generously  dealt  out  to  them 
by  the  new  evolutionism. 

Among  scientific  minds  of  the  first  order,  Lyell 
alone  in  England,  heavily  weighted  by  theological  pre- 
conceptions, for  awhile  hung  back.  All  his  life  long, 
as  his  letters  show  us,  the  great  geologist  had  felt  the 
powerful  spell  of  the  Lamarckian  hypothesis  continually 
enticing  him  with  its  seductive  charm.  He  had  fought 
against  it  blindly,  in  the  passionate  endeavour  to  pre-^ 
serve  what  he  thought  his  higher  faith  in  the  separate 
and  divine  creation  of  man ;  but  ever  and  anon  he 
returned  anew  to  the  biological  Circe  with  a  fresh  fasci- 
nation, as  the  moth  returns  to  the  beautiful  flame  that 
has  scorched  and  singed  it.  In  a  well-known  passage 
in  the  earlier  editions  of  his  '  Principles  of  Geology/ 
the  father  of  uniformitarianism  gives  at  length  his  own 
reasons  for  dissenting  from  the  doctrine  of  evolution  as 
then  set  forth ;  and  even  after  Darwin's  discovery  had 
supplied  him  with  a  new  clue,  a  vera  caiLsa,  a  sufiicient 
power  for  the  modification  of  species  into  fresh  forms, 
theological  difiiculties  made  him  cling  still  as  long  as 
possible  to  the  old  theory  of  the  origin  of  man  which 
he  loved  to  describe  as  that  of  the  *  archangel  ruined.' 
He  was  loth  to  exchange  this  cherished  belief  for  the 
degrading  alternative  (as  it  approved  itself  to  him)  of 
the  ape  elevated.  But  in  the  end,  with  the  fearless 
honesty  of  a  searcher  after  truth,  he  gave  way  slowly 
and  regretfully.  Always  looking  back  with  something 
like  remorse  to  the  flesh-pots  of  the  ecclesiastical  Egypt, 
with  its  enticing  visions  of  fallen  grandeur,  the  great 
thinker  whose  uniformitarian  theory  of  geology  had 
more  than  aught  else  pdved  the  way  for  the  gradual 


120  Charles  Darwin 

acceptance  of  Darwin's  evolutionism,  came  out  at  last 
from  the  house  of  bondage,  and  nobly  ranged  himself 
on  the  side  of  what  his  intellect  judged  to  be  the  truth 
of  ilature,  though  his  emotions  urged  him  hard  to  blind 
his  judgment  and  to  neglect  its  lights  for  an  emotional 
figment.  Science  has  no  more  pathetic  figure  than 
that  of  the  old  philosopher,  in  his  sixty-sixth  year, 
throwing  himself  with  all  the  eag(  r.iess  of  youth  into 
what  he  had  long  considered  the  wrong  scale,  and 
vigorously  wrecking  in  the  '  Antiquity  of  Man '  what 
seemed  to  the  dimmed  vision  of  his  own  emotional 
nature  the  very  foundations  of  his  beloved  creed.  But 
still  he  did  it.  He  came  out  and  was  separate.  In  his 
own  idiomatic  language,  he  found  at  last  that '  we  must 
go  the  whole  om-ang ; '  and,  deep  as  was  the  pang  that 
the  recantation  cost  him,  he  formally  retracted  the  con- 
demnation of '  transformism '  in  his  earlier  works,  and 
accepted,  however  unwillingly,  the  theory  he  had  so 
often  and  so  deliberately  rejected. 

The  '  Antiquity  of  Man '  came  out  in  February 
1863,  some  three  years  after  the  '  Origin  of  Species.' 
For  some  time  speculation  had  been  active  over  the 
strange  hatchets  which  Boucher  de  Perthes  had  recently 
unearthed  among  the  Abbeville  drift — shapeless  masses 
of  chipped  flint  rudely  fashioned  into  the  form  of  an  axe, 
which  we  now  call  paleeolithic  implements,  and  know  to 
be  the  handicraft  of  preglacial  men.  But  until  Lyell's 
authoritative  work  appeared  the  unscientific  public  could 
not  tell  exactly  what  to  think  of  these  curious  and  almost 
unhuman-looking  objects.  Lyell  at  once  set  all  doubts 
at  rest;  the  magic  of  his  name  silenced  the  derisive 
whispers  of  the  dissidents.  Already,  in  the  previous  year, 


The  Darwinian  Revolution  Begins     121 

the  first  fasciculus  of  Colenso's  famous  work  on  the 
Pentateuch  had  dealt  a  serious  blow  from  the  ecclesias- 
tical and  critical  side  at  the  authenticity  and  historical 
truth  of  the  Mosaic  cosmogony.  Lyell  now  from  the 
scientific  side  completely  demolished  its  literal  truth,  as 
ordinarily  interpreted,  by  throwing  back  the  primitive 
origin  of  our  race  into  a  dim  past  of  immeasurable  anti- 
quity. In  so  doing  he  was  clearing  the  way  for  Charles 
Darwin's  second  great  work,  '  The  Descent  of  Man ; ' 
and  by  incorporating  in  his  book  Huxley's  remarks  on 
the  Neanderthal  skull,  and  much  similar  evolutionary 
matter,  he  advertised  the  new  creed  in  the  animal 
origin  of  our  race  with  all  the  acquired  weight  of  his 
immense  and  justly-deserved  European  reputation.  As 
a  matter  of  taste,  Lyell  did  not  relish  the  application  of 
evolutionism  to  his  own  species.  But,  with  that  perfect 
loyalty  to  fact  which  he  shared  so  completely  with 
Charles  Darwin,  as  soon  as  he  found  the  evidence  over- 
whelming, he  gave  in.  By  that  grudging  concession 
he  immensely  strengthened  the  position  of  the  new 
creed.  '  I  plead  guilty,'  he  writes  to  Sir  Joseph 
Hooker,  'to  going  farther  in  my  reasoning  towards 
transmutation  than  in  my  sentiments  and  imagination, 
and  perhaps  for  that  very  reason  I  shall  lead  more 
people  on  to  Darwin  and  you,  than  one  who,  being  born 
later,  like  Lubbock,  has  comparatively  little  to  abandon 
of  old  and  long-cherished  ideas,  which  constituted  the 
charm  to  me  of  the  theoretical  part  of  the  science  in  my 
earlier  days.'  And  to  Darwin  himself  he  writes  re- 
gretfully. *  The  descent  of  man  from  the  brutes  takes 
away  much  of  the  charm  from  my  speculations  on  the 
past  relating  to  such  matters.'     This  very  reluctance 


122  Charles  Darwin 

itself  told  powerfully  in  favour  of  Charles  Darwin's 
novel  theories  :  there  is  no  evidence  more  valuable  to  a 
cause  than  that  which  it  extorts  by  moral  force,  in  spite 
of  himself,  from  the  faltering  lips  of  an  unwilling 
witness. 

The  same  year  that  saw  the  publication  of  Lyell's 
*  Antiquity  of  Man'  saw  also  the  first  appearance  of 
Huxley's  work  on  'Man's  Place  in  Nature.'  Darwin 
himself  had  been  anxious  rather  than  otherwise  to  avoid 
too  close  reference  to  the  implications  of  his  theory  as 
regards  the  origin  and  destiny  of  the  human  race.  He 
had  desired  that  his  strictly  scientific  views  on  the  rise 
of  specific  distinctions  should  be  judged  entirely  on 
their  own  merits,  unhampered  by  the  interference  of 
real  or  supposed  theological  and  ethical  considerations. 
His  own  language  on  all  such  subjects,  wherever  he  was 
compelled  to  trench  on  them  in  the  '  Origin  of  Species,' 
was  guarded  and  conciliatory ;  he  scarcely  referred  at 
all  to  man  or  his  history ;  and  his  occasional  notices  of 
the  moving  principle  and  first  cause  of  the  entire  cosmos 
were  reverential  and  religious  in  the  truest  sense  and  in 
the  highest  degree.  But  you  cannot  let  loose  a  moral 
whirlwind,  and  then  attempt  to  direct  its  course ;  you 
cannot  open  the  floodgates  of  opinion  or  of  speculation, 
and  then  pretend  to  set  limits  to  the  scope  of  their 
restless  motion.  Darwin  soon  found  out  that  people 
would  insist  in  drawing  inferences  beyond  what  was 
written,  and  in  seeing  implicit  conclusions  when  they 
were  not  definitely  formulated  in  the  words  of  their 
author,  '  Man  is  perennially  interesting  to  man,'  says 
the  great  chaotic  American  thinker ;  and  whatever  all- 
embracing  truth  you  set  before  him,  you  may  be  sure 


The  Darwinian  Revolution  Begins     123 

that  man  will  see  in  it  chiefly  the  implications  that  most 
closely  affect  his  ovm  happiness  and  his  own  destiny. 
The  biological  question  of  the  origin  of  species  is  a 
sufficiently  wide  one,  but  it  includes  also,  among  other 
cases,  the  origin  of  the  very  familiar  species  Homo 
sapiens  of  Linngeus.  Some  theologians  jumped  at  once  at 
the  conclusion,  right  or  wrong,  that  if  Darwinism  were 
true  man  was  nothing  more  than  a  developed  monkey, 
the  immortal  soul  was  an  exploded  myth,  the  founda- 
tions of  religion  itself  were  shattered,  and  the  wave  of 
infidelity  was  doomed  to  swamp  the  whole  of  Christen- 
dom with  its  blank  nihilism.  Scientific  men,  on  the 
other  hand,  drew  the  conclusion  that  man  must  be 
descended,  like  other  mammals,  from  some  common 
early  vertebrate  ancestor,  and  that  the  current  views  of 
his  origin  and  destiny  must  be  largely  modified  by  the 
evolutionary  creed.  Of  this  profound  scientific  belief 
Professor  Huxley's  maiden  work  was  the  earliest  out- 
come. 

Meantime,  on  the  continent  of  Europe  and  over-sea 
in  America,  the  Darwinian  theory  was  being  hotly 
debated  and  warmly  defended.  France,  coldly  sceptical 
and  critical,  positive  rather  than  imaginative  in  matters 
of  science,  and  little  prone  by  native  cast  of  mind  to 
the  evolutionary  attitude,  stood  aloof  to  a  great  extent 
from  the  onward  course  of  the  general  movement.  Here 
and  there,  to  be  sure,  a  Gaudry  or  a  Eibot,  a  Delboeuf 
or  a  De  Candolle  (the  two  latter  a  Liege  Belgian  and  a 
Genevan  Swiss)  might  heartily  throw  himself  into  the 
new  ideas,  and  contribute  whole  squadrons  of  geological 
or  botanical  fact  to  the  final  victory.  Yet,  as  a  whole, 
the  dry  and  cautious  French  intelligence,  ever  inclined 


124  Charles  Darwin 

to  a  scientific  opportunism,  preferred  for  tlie  moment  to 
stand  by  expectant  and  await  the  result  of  the  European 
consensus.  But  philosophical  Germany,  on  the  other 
hand,  beaming  enthusiasm  from  its  myriad  spectacles, 
eagerly  welcomed  the  novel  ideas,  and  proclaimed  from 
the  housetops  the  evolutionary  faith  as  a  main  plank  in 
the  rising  platform  of  the  newly-roused  Kulturkampf. 
Fritz  Miiller  began  with  all  the  ardour  of  a  fresh  con- 
vert to  collect  his  admirable  '  Facts  for  Darwin ; '  his 
brother  Hermann  sat  down  with  indomitable  patience, 
like  tlie  master's  own,  to  watch  the  ceaseless  action  of 
the  bees  and  butterflies  in  the  fertilisation  of  flowers. 
Eiitimeyer  applied  the  Darwinian  principles  to  the 
explanation  of  mammalian  relationships,  and  Haeckel 
set  to  work  upon  his  vast  reconstructive  '  History  of 
Creation,'  a  largely  speculative  work  which,  with  all  its 
faults,  distinctly  carried  forward  the  evolutionary  im- 
pulse, and  set  fresh  researchers  working  upon  new  lines, 
to  confirm  or  to  disprove  its  audacious  imaginings.  In 
America,  Asa  Gray  gave  to  the  young  creed  the  high 
authority  of  his  well-known  name,  and  Chauncey 
Wright  helped  it  onward  on  the  road  with  all  the  re- 
strained force  of  his  singular  and  oblique  but  powerful 
and  original  personality  If  Agassiz  and  Dawson  still 
hesitated,  Fiske  and  Youmans  were  ardent  in  the 
faith.  If  critical  Boston  put  up  its  eye-glass  doubt- 
fully, Chicago  and  St.  Louis  were  ready  for  conversion. 
Everywhere  Darwin  and  Darwinism  became  as  house- 
hold words ;  it  was  the  singular  fate  of  the  great 
prophet  of  evolution,  alone  almost  among  the  sons  of 
men,  to  hear  his  own  name  familiarly  twisted  during 
his  own  lifetime  into  a  colloquial  adjective,  and  to  see 


The  Darwinian  Revolution  Begins      125 

the  Darwinian  theory  and  the  errors  of  Darwinism 
staring  him  in  the  face  a  hundred  times  a  day  from 
every  newspaper  and  every  periodical. 

Of  course  the  '  Origin  of  Species  *  was  largely 
translated  at  once  into  all  the  civilised  languages  of 
Europe,  Russian  as  well  as  French,  Dutch  as  well  as 
German,  Swedish  as  well  as  Italian,  Spanish  as  well  as 
Hungarian,  nay  even,  at  last,  transcending  narrow 
continental  limits,  Japanese  as  well  as  Hindustani.  The 
revolution  which  it  was  rapidly  effecting  was  indeed  a 
revolution  in  every  mode  of  thought  and  feeling  as  well 
as  a  revolution  in  mere  restricted  biological  opinion. 
But  all  this  time,  the  modest,  single-minded,  and  un- 
assuming author  was  working  unmoved  among  his 
plants  and  pigeons  in  his  home  at  Down,  regardless  of 
the  European  fame  he  was  so  quickly  acquiring,  and 
anxious  only  to  bring  to  a  termination  the  vast  work 
which  he  still  contemplated.  A  little  more  than  eleven 
years  intervened  between  the  publication  of  the  '  Origin 
of  Species,'  in  1859,  and  the  first  appearance  of  the 
*  Descent  of  Man,'  in  1871.  The  interval  was  occupied 
in  carrying  out  in  part  the  gigantic  scheme  of  his 
original  collections  for  the  full  treatment  of  the  develop- 
ment theory.  The  work  published  in  1859  Darwin 
regarded  merely  as  an  abstract  and  preliminary  outline 
of  his  full  opinions :  '  No  one  can  feel  more  sensible 
than  I  do,'  he  wrote,  '  of  the  necessity  of  hereafter 
publishing  in  detail  all  the  facts,  with  references,  on 
which  my  conclusions  have  been  grounded.'  The 
mai'vellously  learned  work  on  the  '  Variation  of 
Animals  and  Plants  under  Domestication,'  which  came 
out  in  two  volumes  in  1867,  formed  the  first  instalment 
12 


126  Charles  Darwin 

of  this  long-projected  treatise.  The  second  part,  as  lie 
told  Mr.  Fiske,  was  to  have  treated  of  the  variation  of 
animals  and  plants  through  natural  selection ;  while  the 
third  part  would  have  dealt  at  length  with  the  pheno- 
mena of  morphology,  of  classification,  and  of  distribu- 
tion in  space  and  time.  But  these  latter  portions  of 
the  work  were  never  written.  To  say  the  truth,  they 
were  never  needed.  So  universal  was  the  recognition 
among  the  younger  men  of  Darwin's  discovery,  that 
before  ten  years  were  over  innumerable  workers  were 
pushing  out  the  consequences  of  natural  selection  into 
every  field  of  biology  and  palaeontology.  It  seemed  no 
longer  so  necessary  as  it  had  once  seemed  to  write  the 
larger  and  more  elaborate  treatise  he  had  originally 
contemplated. 

The  volume  on  the  variation  of  animals  and  plants 
contained  also  Darwin's  one  solitaiy  contribution  to  the 
pure  speculative  philosophy  of  life — his  'Provisional 
Hypothesis  of  Pangenesis,'  by  which  he  strove  to 
account  on  philosophical  principles  for  the  general  facts 
of  physical  and  mental  heredity.  Not  to  mince  matters, 
it  was  his  one  conspicuous  failure,  and  is  now  pretty 
universally  admitted  as  such.  Let  not  the  love  of  the 
biographer  deceive  us  ;  Darwin  was  here  attempting  a 
task  ultra  vires.  As  already  observed,  his  mind,  vast 
as  it  was,  leaned  rather  to  the  concrete  than  to  the 
abstract  side :  he  lacked  the  distinctively  metaphysical 
and  speculative  twist.  Strange  to  say,  too,  his  abor- 
tive theory  appeared  some  years  later  than  Herbert 
Spencer's  magnificent  all-sided  conception  of  '  Physio- 
logical Units,'  put  forth  expressly  to  meet  the  self-same 
difficulty.     But  while   Darwin's   hypothesis  is  rudely 


The  Darwinian  Revolution  Begins      127 

materialistic,  Herbert  Spencer's  is  built  up  by  an  acute 
and  subtle  analytical  perception  of  all  the  analogous 
facts  in  universal  nature.  It  is  a  singular  instance 
of  a  crude  and  essentially  unpbilosopliic  conception 
endeavouring  to  replace  a  finished  and  delicate  philo- 
sophical idea. 

Earlier  still,  in  1862,  Darwin  had  published  his 
wonderful  and  fascinating  book  on  the  '  Fertilisation  of 
Orchids.'  It  is  delightful  to  contemplate  the  picture 
of  the  unrufiled  naturalist,  in  the  midst  of  that  uni- 
versal storm  of  ecclesiastical  obloquy  and  scientific 
enthusiasm  which  he  had  roused  throughout  Europe, 
sitting  down  calmly  in  his  Kentish  conservatory  to 
watch  the  behaviour  of  catasetums  and  masdevallias,  and 
to  work  out  the  details  of  his  chosen  subject,  with  that 
marvellous  patience  of  which  he  was  so  great  a  master, 
in  the  pettiest  minutiae  of  fertilisation  as  displayed 
by  a  single  highly  developed  family  of  plants.  Who- 
ever wishes  to  learn  the  full  profundity  of  Darwin's 
researches,  into  every  point  that  he  set  himself  to  inves- 
tigate, cannot  do  better  than  turn  for  a  while  to  the 
consideration  of  that  exquisite  treatise  on  one  of  the 
quaintest  fairylands  of  science.  He  will  there  learn 
by  what  an  extraordinary  wealth  of  cunning  devices 
natural  selection  has  ensured  the  due  conveyance  of 
the  fecundating  pollen  from  stamens  to  stigmas  within 
the  limits  of  a  single  group  of  vegetable  organisms. 
Here  the  fertilising  mass  is  gummed  automatically 
between  the  eyes  of  the  exploring  bee,  and  then 
bent  round  by  the  drying  of  its  stalk  so  as  to  come  in 
contact  with  the  stigmatic  surface.  There  the  pollen  club 
is  jerked  out  elastically  by  a  sensitive  fibre,  and  actually ' 


128  Charles  Darwin 

flung  by  its  irritable  antennae  at  tlie  unconscious  liead 
of  the  fertilising  insect.  In  one  case,  the  lip  of  the 
flower  secretes  moisture  and  forms  a  sort  of  cold  batli, 
which  wets  the  wings  of  the  bees,  so  compelling  them 
to  creep  out  of  the  bucket  by  a  passage  close  to  the 
anthers  and  stigma ;  in  another  case,  the  honey  is  con- 
cealed at  the  bottom  of  so  long  a  tube  that  only  the 
proper  fertilising  moth  with  a  proboscis  of  ten  or  eleven 
inches  iu  length  can  probe  the  deep  recess  in  which  it 
is  hidden.  These,  and  a  hundred  other  similar  in- 
stances, were  all  carefully  considered  and  described  by 
the  great  naturalist  as  the  by-work  with  which  he  filled 
up  one  of  the  intervals  between  his  greater  and  more 
comprehensive  treatises. 

In  the  decade  between  1860  and  1870  the  progress 
of  Darwinism  was  rapid  and  continuous.  One  by  one, 
the  few  scientific  men  who  still  held  out  were  overborne 
by  the  weight  of  evidence.  Geology  kept  supplying 
fresh  instances  of  transitional  forms ;  the  progress  of 
research  in  unexplored  countries  kept  adding  to  our 
knowledge  ot  existing  intermediate  species  and  varieties. 
During  those  ten  years,  Herbert  Spencer  published  his 
'  First  Principles,'  his  '  Biology,'  and  the  remodelled 
form  of  his  '  Psychology ; '  Huxley  brought  out  '  Man's 
Place  in  Nature,'  the  '  Lectures  on  Comparative 
Anatomy,'  and  the  '  Introduction  to  the  Classification 
of  Animals ; '  Wallace  produced  his  '  Malay  Archi- 
pelago '  and  his  '  Contributions  to  the  Theory  of  Natural 
Selection ; '  and  Galton  wrote  his  admirable  work  on 
'  Hereditary  Genius,'  of  which  his  own  family  is  so  re- 
markable an  instance.  Tyndall  and  Lewes  had  long 
since    signified    their    warm    adhesion.     At    Oxford, 


The  Darwinian  Revolution  Begins      129 

Rolleston  was  bringing  tip  a  fresh  generation  of  young 
biologists  in  the  new  faith;  at  Cambridge,  Darwin's 
old  university,  a  whole  school  of  brilliant  and  accurate 
physiologists  was  beginning  to  make  itself  both  felt 
and  heard  in  the  world  of  science.  In  the  domain  of 
anthropology,  Tylor  was  welcoming  the  assistance  of  the 
new  ideas,  while  Lubbock  was  engaged  on  his  kindred 
investigations  into  the  Origin  of  Civilisation  and  the 
Primitive  Condition  of  Man.  All  these  diverse  lines 
of  thought  both  showed  the  wide-spread  influence  of 
Darwin's  first  great  work,  and  led  up  to  the  prepara- 
tion of  his  second,  in  which  he  dealt  with  the  his- 
tory and  development  of  the  human  race.  And  what 
was  thus  true  of  England  was  equally  true  of  the 
civilised  world,  regarded  as  a  whole :  everywhere  the 
great  evolutionary  movement  was  well  in  progress; 
everywhere  the  impulse  sent  forth  from  that  quiet 
Kentish  home  was  permeating  and  quickening  the  entire 
pulse  of  intelligent  humanity. 

Why  was  it  that  the  '  Origin  of  Species  '  possessed 
this  extraordinary  vitalising  and  kinetic  power,  this 
germinal  energy,  this  contagious  force,  beyond  all  other 
forms  of  evolutionism  previously  promulgated  ?  Why 
did  the  world,  that  listened  so  coldly  to  Lamarck  and 
Chambers,  turn  so  ready  an  ear  to  Charles  Darwin  and 
natural  selection  ?  Partly,  no  doubt,  because  in  the 
fulness  of  time  the  moment  had  come  and  the  prophet 
had  arisen.  All  great  movements  are  long  brewing, 
and  burst  out  at  last  (like  the  Reformation  and  the 
French  Revolution)  with  explosive  energy.  But  the 
cause  is  largely  to  be  found,  also,  I  believe,  in  the 
peculiar  nature  of  the   Darwinian  solution.     True,  a 


130  Charles  Darwin 

thoroughly  logical  mind,  a  mind  of  the  very  highest 
order,  would  have  said  even  before  Darwin,  '  Creation 
can  have  no  possible  place  in  the  physical  series  of 
things  at  all.  How  organisms  came  to  be  I  do  not  yet 
exactly  see ;  but  I  am  sure  they  must  have  come  to  be 
by  some  merely  physical  process,  if  we  could  only  find 
it  out.'  And  such  minds  were  all  actually  evolutionary 
even  before  Darwin  had  made  the  modus  operandi  of 
evolution  intelligible.  But  most  people  are  not  so  clear- 
sighted. They  require  to  have  everything  proved  to 
them  by  the  strictest  collocation  of  actual  instances. 
They  will  not  believe  unless  one  rise  from  the  dead. 
There  are  men  who  rejected  the  raw  doctrine  of  special 
creation  on  evidence  adduced ;  and  there  are  men  who 
never  even  for  a  moment  entertained  it  as  conceivable. 
The  former  compose  the  mass  of  the  scientific  world,  and 
it  was  for  their  conversion  that  the  Darwinian  hypothesis 
was  so  highly  salutary.  As  Professor  Fiske  rightly 
remarks,  '  The  truth  is  that  before  the  publication  of 
the  "  Origin  of  Species  "  there  was  no  opinion  whatever 
current  respecting  the  subject  that  deserved  to  be  called 
a  scientific  hypothesis.  That  the  more  complex  forms 
of  life  must  have  come  into  existence  through  some 
process  of  development  from  simpler  forms  was  no  doubt 
the  only  sensible  and  rational  view  to  take  of  the  subject; 
but  in  a  vague  and  general  opinion  of  this  sort  there  is 
nothing  that  is  properly  scientific.  A  scientific  hypo- 
thesis must  connect  the  phenomena  with  which  it 
deals  by  alleging  a  "  true  cause ; "  and  before  1859  no 
one  had  suggested  a  "  true  cause  "  for  the  origination  of 
new  species,  although  the  problem  was  one  over  which 
every  philosophical  naturalist  had   puzzled   since  the 


The  Darwinian  Revolution  Begins      131 

beginning  of  the  century.  This  explains  why  Mr. 
Darwin's  success  was  so  rapid  and  complete,  and  it  also 
explains  why  he  came  so  near  being  anticipated.'  To 
put  it  briefly,  a  priori,  creation  is  from  the  very  first 
unbelievable;  but,  as  a  matter  of  evidence,  Lamarck 
failed  to  make  evolution  comprehensible,  or  to  give  a 
rationale  of  its  mode  of  action,  while  Darwin's  theory 
of  natural  selection  succeeded  in  doing  so  for  those  who 
awaited  a  posteriori  proof.  Hence  Darwin  was  able  to 
convert  the  world,  where  Lamarck  had  only  been  able 
to  stir  up  enquiry  among  the  picked  spirits  of  the 
scientific  and  philosophical  coterie.  Therein  lies  the 
true  secret  of  his  rapid,  his  brilliant,  and  his  triumphant 
progress.  He  had  found  out  not  only  tJiat  it  was  so, 
but  how  it  was  so,  too.  In  Aristotelian  phrase,  he  had 
discovered  the  vrwy  as  well  as  the  ore. 


132  Charles  Darwin 


CHAPTER  Vin. 

THE  DESCENT  OF  MAN. 

In  1871,  nearly  twelve  years  after  the  'Origin  of 
Species,'  Darwin  published  Ms  '  Descent  of  Man.' 

We  have  seen  already  that  he  would  fain  have 
avoided  the  treatment  of  this  difficult  and  dangerous 
topic  a  little  longer,  so  as  to  let  his  main  theory  be 
fairly  judged  on  its  own  merits,  without  the  obtrusion 
of  theological  or  personal  feelings  into  so  purely  biologi- 
cal a  question ;  but  the  current  was  too  strong  for  him, 
and  at  last  he  yielded.  On  the  one  hand,  the  adversaries 
had  drawn  for  themselves  the  conclusion  of  man's  purely 
animal  origin,  and  held  it  up  to  ridicule  under  false 
forms  in  the  most  absurd  and  odious  light.  On  the 
other  hand,  imprudent  allies  had  put  forth  under  the 
evolutionary  segis  their  somewhat  hypothetical  and  ex- 
travagant speculations  on  this  involved  subject,  which 
Darwin  was  naturally  anxious  to  correct  and  modify  by 
his  own  more  sober  and  guarded  inferences.  The  result 
was  the  second  great  finishing  work  of  the  complete 
Darwinian  system  of  things. 

Ever  since  evolutionism  had  begun  to  be  at  all  it 
had  been  observed  that  a  natural  corollary  from  the 
doctrine  of  descent  with  modification  was  the  belief  in 


The  Descent  of  Man  133 

man's  common  ancestry  with  the  anthropoid  apes.  As 
early  as  the  middle  of  the  last  century,  indeed,  Lord 
Monboddo,  a  whimsical  Scotch  eccentric,  had  suggested 
in  his  famous  book  on  the  origin  of  language  the  idea 
that  men  were  merely  developed  monkeys.  But  this 
crude  and  unorganised  statement  of  a  great  truth, 
being  ultimately  based  upon  no  distinct  physical  grounds, 
deserved  scarcely  to  be  classed  higher  than  the  childish 
evolutionism  of  '  Telliamed '  De  Maillet,  which  makes 
birds  descend  from  flying-fish  and  men  the  offspring 
of  the  hypothetical  tritons.  On  this  point  as  on  most 
others  the  earliest  definite  scientific  views  are  those  of 
Buflfon,  who  ventured  to  hint  with  extreme  caution  the 
possibility  of  a  common  ancestry  for  man  and  all  other 
vertebrate  animals.  Goethe  the  all-sided  had  caught 
a  passing  glimpse  of  the  same  profound  conception 
about  the  date  of  the  Reign  of  Terror ;  and  Erasmus 
Darwin  had  openly  announced  it,  though  without  much 
elaboration,  in  his  precocious  and  premature  '  Zoonomia.' 
Still  more  specifically,  in  a  note  to  the  'Temple  of 
Nature,'  the  English  evolutionist  says :  *  It  has  been 
supposed  by  some  that  mankind  were  formerly  qua- 
drupeds. .  .  .  These  philosophers,  with  BufFon  and 
Helvetius,  seem  to  imagine  that  mankind  arose  from 
one  family  of  monkeys  on  the  banks  of  the  Mediter- 
ranean ; '  and  in  the  third  canto  of  that  fantastic  poem, 
he  enlarges  upon  the  great  part  performed  by  the  hand, 
with  its  opposable  thumb,  in  the  development  and  pro- 
gress of  the  human  species.  Lamarck,  in  his  '  Philo- 
Bophie  Zoologique,'  distinctly  lays  down  the  doctrine 
that  man  is  descended  from  an  ape-like  ancestor,  which 
gradually  acquired  the  upright  position,  not  even  now 


134  Charles  Darwin 

wliolly  natural  to  tlie  human  race,  and  maintained  only 
by  tlie  most  constant  watchfulness.  The  orang-outang 
was  then  the  highest  known  anthropoid  ape ;  and  it 
was  from  the  orang-outang,  therefore,  that  the  fancy  of 
Lyell  and  other  objectors  in  the  pre-Darwinian  days 
continually  derived  the  Lamarckian  Adam. 

The  introduction  of  the  chimpanzee  into  our  Euro- 
pean Zoological  Gardens  gave  a  fresh  type  of  anthropoid 
to  the  crude  speculators  of  the  middle  decades  of  the 
century;  and  in  1859,  Paul  du  Chaillu,  the  explorer 
and  hunter  of  the  Gaboon  country,  brought  over  to 
America  and  Europe  the  first  specimens  of  the  true 
gorilla  ever  seen  by  civilised  men.  There  can  be  little 
doubt  that  the  general  interest  excited  by  his  narrative 
of  his  adventures  (published  in  London  in  1861)  and 
by  the  well-known  stufied  specimen  of  the  huge  African 
anthropoid  ape  so  long  conspicuous  in  the  rooms  of  the 
British  Museum,  and  now  surviving  (somewhat  the 
worse  for  wear)  in  the  natural  history  collection  at 
South  Kensington,  did  much  to  kindle  public  curiosity 
as  to  the  nature  of  our  relations  with  the  lower  animals. 
It  is  no  mere  accidental  circumstance,  indeed,  that 
Huxley  should  have  brought  out '  Man's  Place  in  Nature' 
just  two  years  after  Du  Chaillu's  *  Explorations  and 
Adventures  in  Equatorial  Africa '  had  made  the  whole 
world,  lay  and  learned,  familiar  with  the  name  and 
features  of  the  most  human  in  outer  aspect  among  the 
anthropoid  family.  Thenceforth  the  gorilla,  and  not 
the  orang-outang,  was  popularly  hit  upon  by  scoffer 
and  caricaturist  as  the  imaginary  type  of  our  primitive 
ancestors. 

On  the  other  hand,  during  the  twelve  intervening 


The  Descent  of  Man  135 

years  immense  strides  had  been  made  in  every  depai-t- 
ment  of  anthropological  science,  and  the  whole  tenor  of 
modern  speculation  had  been  clearing  the  ground  for 
the  'Descent  of  Man.'  In  1865,  Kolle  in  Germany 
had  published  his  work  on  '■  Man  Viewed  by  the  Light 
of  the  Darwinian  Theory.'  Two  years  later,  Canestrini 
in  Italy  read  before  the  Naturalists'  Society  of  Modena 
his  interesting  paper  on  rudimentary  characters  as 
bearing  on  the  origin  of  the  human  species.  In  1868, 
Biichner  brought  out  his  rudely  materialistic  sledge- 
hammer lectures  on  the  Darwinian  principle;  and  in 
1869,  Barrago  flung  straight  at  the  head  of  the  Roman 
clericals  his  offensive  work  on  man  and  the  anthropoid 
apes.  Most  of  these  foreign  publications  were  unhappily 
marked  by  that  coarse  and  almost  vituperative  opposi- 
tion to  received  views  which  too  often  disfigures  French 
and  German  controversial  literature.  In  England,  on 
the  contrary,  under  our  milder  and  gentler  ecclesiastical 
yoke,  the  contest  had  been  conducted  with  greater 
decorum  and  with  far  better  results.  Wallace  had 
broken  ground  tentatively  and  reverently  in  his  essay 
on  the  '  Origin  of  Human  Races,'  where  he  endeavoured 
to  show  that  man  is  the  co-descendant  with  the  anthro- 
poid apes  of  some  ancient  lower  and  extinct  form. 
Lubbock's  'Prehistoric  Times'  (1865)  and  'Origin  of 
Civilisation'  (1870)  helped  to  clear  the  way  in  the 
opposite  direction  by  demolishing  the  old  belief,  firmly 
upheld  by  Whately  and  others,  that  savages  represent 
a  degraded  type,  and  that  the  civilised  state  is  natural 
and,  so  to  speak,  congenital  to  man.  Tylor's  '  Early 
History  of  Mankind'  (1865)  did  still  more  eminent 
service  in  the  same  direction.     Colenso's  'Pentateuch 


136  Charles  Darwin 

and  Book  of  Josliua  Critically  Examined,'  tlie  publication 
of  which  began  in  1862,  had  already  shaken  the  founda- 
tions of  the  Mosaic  cosmogony,  and  incidentally  dis- 
credited the  received  view  of  the  direct  creation  of  the 
first  human  family.  M'Lennan's  '  Primitive  Marriage' 
(1865)  and  Herbert  Spencer's  articles  on  the  origin  of 
religion  had  kept  speculation  alive  along  other  paths, 
all  tending  ultimately  towards  the  same  conclusion. 
Darwin's  own  cousin,  Hensleigh  Wedgwood,  and  Canon 
Farrar,  had  independently  endeavoured  to  prove  that 
language,  instead  of  being  a  divine  gift,  might  have 
arisen  in  a  purely  natural  manner  from  instinctive  cries 
and  the  imitation  of  external  sounds.  The  Duke  of 
Argyll  and  Professor  Max  Miiller,  by  the  obvious  feeble- 
ness of  their  half-hearted  replies,  had  unconsciously 
aided  in  disseminating  and  enforcing  the  very  views  they 
attempted  to  combat,  Bagehot  and  Flower,  Maudsley 
and  Jevons,  Vogt  and  Lindsay,  Galton  and  Brown- 
Sequard  had  each  in  his  way  contributed  facts  and  argu- 
ments ultimately  utilised  by  the  great  master  architect 
in  building  up  his  consistent  and  harmonious  edifice. 
Finally,  in  1868,  Haeckel  had  published  his  'Natural 
History  of  Creation,'  in  which  he  discussed  with  sur- 
prising and  perhaps  excessive  boldness  the  various  stages 
in  the  genealogy  of  man.  These  various  works,  follow- 
ing so  close  upon  Huxley's  '  Man's  Place  in  Nature ' 
and  Lyell's  conclusive  '  Antiquity  of  Man,'  left  Darwin 
no  choice  but  to  set  forth  his  own  reasoned  opinions  on 
the  subject  of  the  origin  and  development  of  the  human 
species. 

The  evidence  of  the  descent  of  man  from  some  lower 
form,  collected  and  marshalled  together  by  Darwin,  con- 


The  Descent  of  Man  137 

sists  chiefly  of  minute  inferential  proofs  which  hardly 
admit  of  deliberate  condensation.  In  his  bodily  struc- 
ture man  is  formed  on  the  same  underlying  type  or 
model  as  all  the  other  mammals,  bone  answering 
throughout  to  bone,  as,  for  example,  in  the  fore  limb, 
where  homologous  parts  have  been  modified  in  the  dog 
into  toes,  in  the  bat  into  wing-supports,  in  the  seal  into 
flippers,  and  in  man  himself  into  fingers  and  thumb, 
while  still  retaining  in  every  case  their  essential  funda- 
mental likeness  of  construction.  Even  the  brain  of 
man  resembles  closely  the  brain  of  the  higher  monkeys ; 
the  differences  which  separate  him  in  this  respect  from 
the  orang  or  the  gorilla  are  far  slighter  than  the 
differences  which  separate  those  apes  themselves  from 
the  inferior  monkeys.  Indeed,  as  Huxley  conclusively 
showed,  on  anatomical  grounds  alone,  man  must  be 
classed  in  the  order  Primates  as  only  one  among  the 
many  divergent  forms  which  that  order  includes  within 
its  wide  limits. 

In  his  embryonic  development  man  closely  resembles 
the  lower  animals,  the  human  creature  being  almost  indis- 
tinguishable in  certain  stages  from  the  dog,  the  bat,  the 
seal,  and  especially  the  monkeys.  At  a  very  early  age 
he  possesses  a  slight  projecting  tail ;  at  another,  the 
great  toe  is  shorter  than  its  neighbours,  and  projects 
like  the  thumb  at  a  slight  angle  ;  and  at  a  third,  the 
convolutions  of  the  brain  reach  a  point  of  development 
about  equivalent  to  that  of  the  adult  baboon.  In  hia 
first  stages  man  himself  stands  far  more  closely  related 
to  the  apes  than  the  apes  in  turn  stand  to  cats  or 
hyasnas. 

Rudiments  of  muscles  not;  normally  found  in  m§n 
13 


138  Charles  Darwin 

occur  in  many  aberrant  human  individuals.  Some 
people  possess  the  power  of  moving  their  scalps  and 
"wagging  their  ears  like  dogs  and  monkeys ;  others  can 
twitch  the  skin  of  their  bodies,  as  horses  do  when 
worried  by  flies.  Mr.  Woolner,  the  sculptor,  pointed 
out  to  Darwin  a  certain  little  projecting  point  or  knob 
on  the  margin  of  the  ear,  observed  by  him  in  the  course 
of  modelling,  which  comparison  shows  to  be  the  last 
folded  remnant  or  rudiment  of  the  once  erect  and 
pointed  monkey-like  ear-tip.  The  nictitating  membrane, 
or  third  eyelid,  once  more,  which  in  birds  can  be  drawn 
so  rapidly  across  the  ball  of  the  eye,  and  which  gives 
the  familiar  glazed  or  murky  appearance,  is  fairly  well 
developed  in  the  ornithorhynchus  and  the  kangaroo,  as 
well  as  in  a  few  higher  mammals,  like  the  walrus ;  but 
in  man,  as  in  the  monkey  group,  it  survives  only  under 
the  degenerate  form  of  a  practically  useless  rudiment, 
the  semilunar  fold.  Man  differs  from  the  other 
Primates  in  his  apparently  hairless  condition  ;  but  the 
hair,  though  short  and  downy,  still  remains  on  close 
inspection,  and  in  some  races,  such  as  the  Ainos  of 
Japan,  forms  a  shaggy  coat  like  an  orang's  or  a  gibbon's. 
A  few  long  rough  hairs  sometimes  project  from  the  short 
smooth  down  of  the  eyebrows ;  and  these  peculiar  bristles, 
occasional  only  in  the  human  species,  are  habitual  in 
the  chimpanzee  and  in  many  baboons.  Internal  organs 
show  similar  rudiments,  of  less  enthralling  interest,  it 
must  be  candidly  confessed,  to  the  unscientific  outside 
intelligence.  Even  the  bony  skeleton  contributes  its 
share  of  confirmatory  evidence ;  for  in  the  lower  monkeys 
and  in  many  other  mammals  a  certain  main  trunk  nerve 
passes  through  a  special  perforation  in  the  shoulder- 


The  Descent  of  Man  139 

"blade,  and  tMs  perforation,  thougli  now  almost  obsolete, 
sometimes  recurs  in  man,  in  which  case  the  nerve  in 
question  invariably  passes  through  it,  as  in  the  inferior 
monkeys.  What  is  still  more  remarkable  is  the  fact 
that  the  perforation  occurs  far  more  frequently  (in  pro- 
portion) among  the  skeletons  of  very  ancient  races  than 
among  those  of  our  own  time.  One  chief  cause  why 
in  this  and  other  cases  ancient  races  often  present 
structures  resembling  those  of  the  lower  animals  seems 
to  be  that  they  stand  nearer  in  the  long  line  of  descent 
to  their  remote  animal-like  progenitors. 

The  conclusion  at  which,  after  fully  examining  all 
the  evidence,  Darwin  finally  arrives  is  somewhat  as 
follows : 

The  early  ancestors  of  man  must  have  been  more 
or  less  monkey-like  animals,  belonging  to  the  great 
anthropoid  group,  and  related  to  the  progenitors  of  the 
orang-outang,  the  chimpanzee,  and  the  gorilla.  They 
must  have  been  once  covered  with  hair,  both  sexes 
possessing  beards.  Their  ears  were  probably  pointed 
and  capable  of  movement,  and  their  bodies  were  pro- 
vided with  a  movable  tail.  The  foot  had  a  great  toe 
somewhat  thumb-like  in  its  action,  with  which  they 
could  grasp  the  branches  of  trees.  They  were  probably 
arboreal  in  their  habits,  fruit-eaters  by  choice,  and  in- 
habitants of  some  warm  forest-clad  land.  The  males  had 
great  canine  teeth,  with  which  they  fought  one  another 
for  the  possession  of  the  females.  At  a  much  earlier 
period,  the  internal  anatomical  peculiarities  approached 
those  of  the  lowest  mammals,  and  the  eye  was  provided 
with  a  third  eyelid.  Peering  still  further  back  into  the 
dim  abyss  of  the  ages,  Darwin  vaguely  describes  the 


140  Charles  Darwin 

ancestors  of  humanity  as  aquatic  animals,  allied  to  tlie 
mudfisli ;  for  our  lungs  are  known  to  consist  of  modified 
swim-bladders,  whicli  must  once  have  served  our  remote 
progenitors  in  the  office  of  a  float.  The  gill-clefts  on 
the  neck  of  the  human  embryo  still  point  to  the  spot 
where  the  branchiee  once,  no  doubt,  existed.  Our  prim- 
ordial birthplace  appears  to  have  been  a  shore  washed 
twice  a  day  by  the  recurrent  tides.  The  heart  then  took 
the  shape  merely  of  a  simple  pulsating  vessel ;  and  a 
long  undivided  spinal  cord  usurped  the  place  of  the 
vertebral  column.  These  extremely  primitive  ancestors 
of  man,  thus  dimly  beheld  across  the  gulf  of  ages,  must 
have  been  at  least  as  simply  and  humbly  organised  as 
that  very  lowest  and  earliest  of  existing  vertebrates,  the 
worm-like  lancelet. 

From  such  a  rude  and  indefinite  beginning  natural 
selection,  aided  by  the  various  concomitant  principles, 
has  slowly  built  up  the  pedigree  of  man.  Starting 
from  these  remote  half-invertebrate  forms,  whose  vague 
shape  is  still  perhaps  in  part  preserved  for  us  by  the  soft 
and  jelly-like  larva  of  the  modem  ascidian,  we  rise  by 
long  stages  to  a  group  of  early  fishes,  like  the  lancelet 
itself.  From  these  the  ganoids  and  then  the  lung-bearing 
mudfish  must  have  been  gradually  developed.  From 
such  fish  a  very  small  advance  would  carry  us  on  to  the 
newts  and  other  amphibians.  The  duck-billed  platypus 
helps  us  slightly  to  bridge  over  the  gap  between  the 
reptiles  and  the  lower  mammals,  such  as  the  kangaroo  and 
the  wombat,  though  the  connection  with  the  amphibians 
is  still,  as  when  Darwin  wrote,  highly  problematical. 
From  marsupials,  such  as  the  kangaroo,  we  ascend 
gradually  to  the  insectivorous  type  represented  by  the 


The  Descent  of  Man  141 

shrews  and  liedgeliogg,  and  thence  once  more  by  very 
well-marked  intermediate  stages  to  the  lemurs  of 
Madagascar,  a  group  linked  on  the  one  hand  to  the 
insectivores,  and  on  the  other  to  the  true  monkeys.  The 
monkeys,  again,  'branched  off  into  two  great  stems — 
the  New  World  and  Old  World  monkeys ;  and  from  the 
latter,  at  a  remote  period,  man,  the  wonder  and  glory  of 
the  universe,  proceeded,' 

The  word  was  spoken;  the  secret  Was  out.  The 
world  might  well  have  been  excused  for  treating  it 
scornfully.  But  as  a  matter  of  fact,  the  storm  which 
followed  the  '  Descent  of  Man '  was  as  nothing  compared 
with  the  torrent  of  abuse  that  had  pursued  the  author 
of  the  '  Origin  of  Species.'  In  twelve  years  society 
had  grown  slowly  accustomed  to  the  once  startling  idea, 
and  it  listened  now  with  comparatively  languid  interest 
to  the  final  utterance  of  the  great  biologist  on  the 
question  of  its  own  origin  and  destinies.  In  1859  it 
cried  in  horror,  '  How  very  shocking ! '  in  1871,  it 
murmured  complacently,  '  Is  that  all  ?  Why,  everybody 
knew  that  much  already  !  * 

Nevertheless,  on  the  moral  and  social  side,  the 
ultimate  importance  of  the  '  Descent  of  Man  '  upon  the 
world's  history  can  hardly  be  overrated  by  a  philosophic 
investigator.  Vast  as  was  the  revolution  efiected  in 
biology  by  the  '  Origin  of  Species,'  it  was  as  nothing 
compared  with  the  still  wider,  deeper,  and  more  subtly- 
working  revolution  inaugurated  by  the  announcement 
of  man's  purely  animal  origin.  The  main  discovery, 
strange  to  say,  affected  a  single  branch  of  thought  alone ; 
the  minor  corollary  drawn  from  it  to  a  single  species 
has  already  affected,  and  is  destined  in  the  future  still 


142  Charles  Darwin 

more  profoundedly  to  affect,  every  possible  sphere  of 
human  energy.  Not  only  has  it  completely  reversed 
our  entire  conception  of  history  generally,  by  teaching 
us  that  man  has  slowly  risen  from  a  very  low  and 
humble  beginning,  but  it  has  also  revolutionised  our 
whole  ideas  of  our  own  position  and  our  own  destiny,  it 
has  permeated  the  sciences  of  language  and  of  medicine, 
it  has  introduced  new  conceptions  of  ethics  and  of 
religion,  and  it  threatens  in  the  future  to  produce  im- 
mense eflfects  upon  the  theory  and  practice  of  education, 
of  politics,  and  of  economic  and  social  science.  These 
wide-reaching  and  deep-seated  results  began  to  be  felt 
from  the  first  moment  when  the  Darwinian  principle 
was  definitely  promulgated  in  the  *  Origin  of  Species, 
but  their  final  development  and  general  acceptance  was 
immensely  accelerated  by  Darwin's  own  authoritative 
statement  in  the  '  Descent  of  Man.' 

To  some  among  us  still,  as  to  Lyell  before  us,  this 
new  belief  in  the  animal  origin  of  man  seems  far  less 
beautiful,  noble,  and  inspiriting  than  the  older  faith  in  his 
special  and  separate  divine  creation.  Such  thinkers  find  it 
somehow  more  pleasant  and  comfortable  to  suppose  that 
man  has  fallen  than  that  man  has  risen  ;  the  doctrine  of 
the  universal  degradation  of  humanity  paradoxically  ap- 
pears to  them  more  full  of  promise  and  aspiration  for  the 
times  to  come  than  the  doctrine  of  its  universal  elevation. 
To  Darwin  himself,  however,  it  seemed  otherwise.  '  Man,' 
he  says, '  may  be  excused  for  feeling  some  pride  at  having 
risen,  though  not  through  his  own  exertions,  to  the  very 
summit  of  the  organic  scale  ;  and  the  fact  of  his  having 
thus  risen,  instead  of  having  been  aboriginally  placed 
there,  may  give  him  hope  for  a  still  higher  destiny  in 


The  Descent  of  Man  143 

the  distant  future.'  Surely  this  is  the  truer  and  manlier 
way  of  looking  at  the  reversed  and  improved  attitude 
of  man.  Surely  it  is  better  to  climb  to  the  top  than  to 
have  been  placed  there — and  fallen — at  the  very  outset. 
Surely  it  is  a  nobler  view  of  life  that  we  may  yet  by 
our  own  strenuous  exertions  raise  our  race  some  places 
higher  in  the  endless  and  limitless  hierarchy  of  nature 
than  that  we  are  the  miserable  and  hopelessly  degene- 
rate descendants  of  a  ruined  and  degraded  angelic 
progenitor.  Surely  it  is  well,  while  we  boast  with 
Glaucus  that  we  indeed  are  far  braver  and  better  than 
our  ancestors,  to  pray  at  the  same  time,  in  the  words  of 
Hector,  that  our  sons  may  be  yet  braver  and  better  than 
ourselves. 


144  Charles  D ah  win 


CHAPTER  IX. 

THE   THEORY   OF  COURTSHIP. 

In  the  same  volumes  with  the  '  Descent  of  Man '  Darwin 
included  his  admirable  treatise  on  sexual  selection. 
This  form  of  selection  he  had  already  dealt  with  briefly 
in  the  '  Origin  of  Species ; '  but  as  in  his  opinion  it  was 
largely  instrumental  in  producing  the  minor  differences 
which  separate  one  race  of  men  from  another,  he  found 
it  necessary  to  enlarge  and  expand  it  in  connection  with 
his  account  of  the  rise  and  progress  of  the  human 
species. 

Among  many  animals,  and  especially  in  the  higher 
classes  of  animals,  the  males  and  females  do  not  mate 
together  casually  j  there  is  a  certain  amount  of  selection 
or  of  courtship.  In  some  cases,  as  with  deer  and 
antelopss,  the  males  fight  with  one  another  for  the 
possession  of  the  females.  In  other  cases,  as  with  the 
peacock  and  the  humming-birds,  the  males  display  their 
beauty  and  their  skill  before  the  eyes  of  the  assembled  . 
females.  In  the  first  instance,  the  victor  obtains  the 
mates;  in  the  second  instance,  the  mates  themselves 
select  from  the  group  the  handsomest  and  most  person- 
ally pleasing  competitor.  Sexual  selection,  of  which 
these   are    special    cases,    depends    on   the   advantage 


The  Theory  of  Courtship  145 

possessed  by  certain  individuals  over  others  of  the  same 
sex  and  species  solely  in  respect  to  the  question  of 
mating.  In  all  such  instances,  the  males  have  acquired 
their  weapons  of  offence  and  defence  or  their  ornamental 
decorations,  not  from  being  better  fitted  to  survive  in 
the  struggle  for  existence,  but  from  having  gained  an 
advantage  over  other  males  of  the  same  kind,  and  from 
having  transmitted  this  advantage  to  offspring  of  their" 
own  sex  alone. 

Just  as  man  can  improve  the  breed  of  his  game- 
cocks by  the  selection  of  those  birds  which  are  victorious 
in  the  cockpit,  so  the  strongest  and  most  vigorous  males, 
or  those  provided  with  the  best  weapons,  have  prevailed 
in  the  state  of  nature  over  their  feebler  and  more 
cowardly  competitors.  Just  as  man  can  give  beauty, 
according  to  his  own  standard  of  taste,  to  his  male 
poultry,  by  selecting  special  birds  for  their  plumage, 
their  port,  their  wattles,  or  their  hackles,  so  female 
birds  in  a  state  of  nature  have  by  a  long-continued 
choice  of  the  more  attractive  males  added  to  their 
beauty  and  their  ornamental  adjuncts.  In  these  two 
ways,  Darwin  believed,  a  limited  selection  has  slowly 
developed  weapons  like  the  horns  of  buffaloes,  the 
antlers  of  stags,  the  tusks  of  boars,  and  the  spurs  of 
game-birds,  together  with  the  courage,  strength,  and 
pugnacity  always  associated  with  such  special  organs. 
\  It  has  also  developed  the  ornamental  plumage  of  the 
peacock,  the  argus  pheasant,  and  the  birds  of  paradise  ; 
the  song  of  the  lark,  the  thrush,  and  the  nightingale ; 
the  brilliant  hues  on  the  face  of  the  mandrill ;  and  the 
attractive  perfume  of  the  musk-deer,  the  snakes,  and 
the  scented  butterflies.     Wherever  one  sex  possesses 


146  Charles  Darwin 

any  decorative  or  alluring  adjunct  not  equally  stared 
by  the  other,  Darwin  attributed  this  special  gift  either 
to  the  law  of  battle,  or  to  the  long  and  slowly  exerted 
selective  action  of  their  fastidious  mates. 

The  germ  of  the  doctrine  of  sexual  selection  is  to  be 
found,  like  so  many  other  of  Charles  Darwin's  theories, 
in  a  prophetic  passage  of  his  grandfather's  '  Zoonomia.' 
Stags,  the  Lichfield  physician  tells  us,  are  provided  with 
antlers  '  for  the  purpose  of  combating  other  stags  for 
the  exclusive  possession  of  the  females,  who  are  ob- 
served, like  the  ladies  in  the  time  of  chivalry,  to  attend 
the  car  of  the  victor.  The  birds  which  do  not  carry 
food  to  their  young,  and  do  not  therefore  marry,  are 
armed  with  spurs  for  the  purpose  of  fighting  for  the 
exclusive  possession  of  the  females,  as  cocks  and  quails. 
It  is  certain  that  these  weapons  are  not  provided  for 
their  defence  against  other  adversaries,  because  the 
females  of  these  species  are  without  this  armour.  The 
final  cause  of  this  contest  among  the  males  seems  to  be 
that  the  strongest  and  most  active  animal  should  propa- 
gate the  species,  which  should  thence  become  improved.* 

It  must  be  noticed,  however,  that  Erasmus  Darwin 
here  imports  into  the  question  the  metaphysical  and 
teleological  notion  of  the  final  cause,  implying  that  the 
struggle  of  the  males  was  ordained  from  without,  for 
this  express  and  preconceived  purpose ;  whereas  Charles 
Darwin,  never  transcending  the  world  of  phenomena, 
more  logically  regards  the  struggle  itself  as  an  efficient 
cause,  having  for  its  result  the  survival  of  the  strongest 
or  the  handsomest  as  the  case  may  be.  This  distinction 
is  fundamental ;  it  marks  the  gulf  between  the  essen- 
tially teleological  spirit  of  the  eighteenth  century  and 


The  Theory  of  Courtship  147 

the  essentially  positive  spirit  of  philosophy  and  science 
at  the  present  day. 

Here  again,  too,  the  immense  logical  supei-iority  of 
Charles  Darwin's  rigorous  and  exhaustive  inductive 
method  over  the  loose  suggestiveness  of  his  grandfather 
Erasmus  may  easily  be  observed.  For  while  Erasmus 
merely  throws  out  a  clever  and  interesting  hint  as  to 
the  supposed  method  and  intention  of  nature,  Charles 
Darwin  proves  his  thesis,  point  by  point,  with  almost 
mathematical  exactitude,  leaving  no  objection  unmet 
behind  him,  but  giving  statistical  and  inductive  warrant 
for  every  step  in  his  cumulative  argument.  He  goes 
carefully  into  the  numerical  proportion  of  the  two  sexes 
in  various  species  ;  into  the  relative  dates  of  an'ival  in 
any  particular  country  of  the  males  and  females  of 
migratory  birds ;  into  the  question  whether  any  indivi- 
duals ever  remain  in  the  long  run  unpaired ;  into  the 
chances  of  the  earliest-mated  or  most  vigorous  couples 
leaving  behind  more  numerous  or  stronger  offspring 
to  represent  them  in  the  next  generation.  He  collects 
from  every  quarter  and  from  all  sources  whatever 
available  evidence  can  be  obtained  as  to  the  courtship 
and  rivalry  of  birds  and  butterflies,  of  deer  and  ante- 
lopes, of  fish  and  lizards.  He  shows  by  numerous 
examples  and  quotations  how  even  flies  coquet  together 
in  their  pretty  rhythmical  aerial  dances;  how  wasps 
battle  eagerly  with  one  another  to  secure  possession  of 
their  unconcerned  mates ;  how  cicadas  strive  to  win 
their  *  voiceless  brides '  with  stridulating  music ;  how 
sphinx-moths  endeavour  to  allure  their  partners  with 
the  musky  odour  of  their  pencilled  wings ;  and  how 
emperors  and  orange-tips  display  their  gorgeous  spots 


148  Charles  Darwin 

and  bands  in  the  broad  sunsliine  before  the  admiring 
and  attentive  eyes  of  their  observant  dames.  He  traces 
up  the  same  spiiit  of  rivalry  and  ostentation  to  the 
cock-pheasant  strutting  about  before  the  attendant 
hen,  and  to  the  meeting-places  of  the  blackcock,  where 
all  the  males  of  the  district  fight  with  one  another 
and  undertake  long  love-dances  in  regular  tournaments, 
while  the  females  stand  by  and  watch  the  chances 
and  changes  of  the  contest  with  aflfected  indifference. 
Finally,  he  points  out  how  similar  efifects  are  produced 
by  like  causes  among  the  higher  animals,  especially 
among  our  near  relations  the  monkeys ;  and  then  he 
proceeds  to  apply  the  principles  thus  fi.rmly  grounded 
to  the  particular  instance  of  the  human  race  itself,  the 
primary  object  of  his  entire  treatise. 

Some  of  the  most  interesting  of  the  modifications 
due  to  this  particular  form  of  selective  action  are  to  be 
found  amongst  the  insects  and  other  low  types  of  animal 
life.  The  crickets,  the  locusts,  and  the  grasshoppers, 
for  example,  are  all  famous  for  their  musical  powers ; 
but  the  sounds  themselves  are  produced  in  the  difierent 
families  by  very  difierent  and  quaintly  varied  organs. 
The  song  of  the  crickets  is  evoked  by  the  scraping  of 
minute  teeth  on  the  under  side  of  either  wing-cover ; 
in  the  case  of  the  locusts,  the  left  wing,  which  acts  as  a 
bow,  overlies  the  right  wing,  which  serves  as  a  fiddle ; 
while  with  the  grasshoppers,  the  leg  does  duty  as  the 
musical  instrument,  and  has  a  row  of  lancet-shaped 
elastic  knobs  along  its  outer  surface,  which  the  insect 
rubs  across  the  nerves  of  the  wing-covers  when  it  wishes 
to  charm  the  ears  and  rouse  the  affection  of  its  silent 
mate.     In  a  South  African  species  of  the  same  family, 


The  Theory  of  Courtship  149 

the  whole  body  of  the  male  is  fairly  converted  into  a 
musical  instrument,  being  immensely  inflated,  hollow, 
and  distended  like  a  pellucid  air-bladder  in  order  to  act 
as  an  efficient  sounding-board.  Among  the  beetles, 
taste  seems  generally  to  have  specialised  itself  rather 
on  form  than  on  music  or  colour,  and  the  males  are 
here  usually  remarkable  for  their  singular  and  very 
complicated  horns,  often  compared  in  various  species  to 
those  of  stags  or  rhinoceroses,  and  entirely  absent  in 
the  females  of  most  kinds.  But  it  is  among  the  butter- 
flies and  moths  that  insect  sestheticism  has  produced  its 
greatest  artistic  triumphs ;  for  here  the  beautiful  eye- 
spots  and  delicate  markings  on  the  expanded  wing- 
membranes  are  almost  certainly  due  to  sexual  selection. 
The  higher  animals  display  like  evidence  of  the  same 
slow  selective  action.  The  courtship  of  the  stickleback, 
who  dances  '  mad  with  delight '  around  the  mate  he  has 
allured  into  the  nest  he  prepares  for  her,  has  been  ob- 
served by  dozens  of  observers  both  before  and  since  in 
the  domestic  aquarium.  The  gem-like  colours  of  the 
male  dragonet,  the  butterfly  wings  of  certaiu  gurnards, 
and  the  decorated  tails  of  some  exotic  carps  all  point  in 
the  same  direction.  Our  own  larger  newt  is  adorned 
during  the  breeding  season  with  a  serrated  crest  edged 
with  orange ;  while  in  the  smaller  kind  the  colours  of 
the  body  acquire  at  the  same  critical  period  of  love- 
making  a  vivid  brilliancy.  The  strange  horns  and 
luridly  coloured  throat-pouches  of  tropical  lizards  are 
familiar  to  all  visitors  in  equatorial  climates,  and  they 
are  confined  exclusively  to  the  male  sex.  Among  birds, 
the  superior  beauty  of  the  male  plumage  is  known  to 
everybody ;  and  their  greatest  glory  invariably  coincides 
14 


150  Charles  Darwin 

with  the  special  season  for  the  selection  of  mates.  In 
the  spring,  as  even  our  poets  have  told  us,  the  wanton 
lapwing  gets  himself  another  crest.  The  law  of  battle 
produces  the  spur  of  the  game-birds  and  the  still 
stranger  wing-spurs  of  certain  species  of  the  plover 
kind.  Esthetic  rivalry  is  answerable  rather  for  vocal 
music,  and  for  the  plumage  of  the  umbrella-bird,  the 
lyre-bird,  the  humming-birds,  and  the  cock  of  the  rocks. 
Among  mammals,  strength  rather  than  beauty  seems 
to  have  carried  the  day ;  horns,  and  tusks,  and  spikes, 
and  antlers  are  here  the  special  guerdon  of  the  victorious 
males.  Yet  even  mammals  show  occasional  signs  of 
distinctly  gesthetic  and  artistic  preferences,  as  in  the 
gracefully  twisted  horns  of  the  koodoo,  the  scent-glands 
of  the  musk-deer  or  of  certain  antelopes,  the  brilliant 
hues  of  the  male  mandiill,  and  the  tufts  and  moustaches 
of  so  many  monkeys. 

It  must  be  frankly  conceded  that  the  reception 
accorded  to  Darwin's  doctrine  of  sexual  selection,  even 
among  the  biological  public,  was  far  less  unanimous, 
enthusiastic,  and  full  than  that  which  had  been  granted 
to  his  more  extensive  theory  of  survival  of  the  fittest, 
!Many  eminent  naturalists  declined  from  the  very  outset 
to  accept  the  conclusions  thus  definitely  set  before  them, 
and  others  who  at  first  seemed  disposed  to  bow  to  the 
immense  weight  of  Darwin's  supreme  authority  gradually 
withdrew  their  grudging  assent  from  the  new  doctrine, 
as  they  found  their  relapse  backed  up  by  others,  and 
refused  to  believe  that  the  theory  of  courtship  had  been 
fairly  proven  before  the  final  tribunal  of  science.  Several 
critic  began  by  objecting  that  the  whole  theory  was  a 
mere    afterthought.      Darwin,  they  said,  finding  that 


The  Theory  of  Courtship  151 

natural  selection  did  not  suffice  by  itself  to  explain  all 
the  details  of  structure  in  man,  iiad  invented  sexual 
selection  as  a  supplementary  principle  to  help  it  over 
the  hard  places.  Those  who  wrote  and  spoke  in  this 
thoughtless  fashion  could  have  liad  but  a  very  inadequate 
idea  of  Darwin's  close  experimental  methods  of  enquiry. 
As  a  matter  of  fact,  indeed,  they  were  entirely  wrong ; 
the  doctrine  of  sexual  selection  itself,  already  faintly 
foreshadowed  by  Erasmus  Darwin  in  the  'Zoonomia,' 
had  been  distinctly  developed  in  the  first  edition  of  the 
'  Origin  of  Species '  with  at  least  as  much  provisional 
elaboration  as  any  other  equally  important  factor  in  the 
biological  drama  as  set  forth  in  that  confessedly  intro- 
ductory work.  Nay,  Haeckel  had  caught  gladly  at  the 
luminous  conception  there  expressed,  even  before  the 
appearance  of  the  '  Descent  of  JNIan,'  and  had  worked  it 
out  in  his  '  Generelle  Morphologie,'  with  great  insight,  to 
its  legitimate  conclusions  in  many  directions.  Indeed, 
the  sole  reason  why  so  much  space  was  devoted  to  the 
subject  in  Darwin's  work  on  human  development  was 
simply  because  there  for  the  first  time  an  opportunity 
arose  of  utilising  his  vast  store  of  collected  information  on 
this  single  aspect  of  the  evolutionary  process.  It  was  no 
afterthought,  but  a  necessary  and  inevitable  component 
element  of  the  fully-developed  evolutionary  concept. 

Still,  it  cannot  be  denied  that  naturalists  generally 
did  not  accept  with  effusion  the  new  clause  in  the 
evolutionary  creed.  Many  of  them  hesitated;  a  few 
acquiesced ;  the  majority  more  or  less  openly  dissented. 
But  Darwin's  belief  remained  firm  as  a  rock.  '  I  am 
glad  you  defend  sexual  selection,'  he  wrote  a  few  years 
later  in  a  private  letter ;  '  I  have  no  fear  about  its  ulti- 


152  Charles  Darwin 

mate  fate,  though  it  is  now  at  a  discount ; '  and  in  the 
preface  to  the  second  edition  of  the  '  Descent  of  Man/ 
he  remarks  acutely,  '  I  have  been  struck  with  the  like- 
ness of  many  of  the  half-favourable  criticisms  on  sexual 
selection  with  those  which  appeared  at  first  on  natural 
selection ;  such  as  that  it  would  explain  some  few  details, 
but  certainly  was  not  applicable  to  the  extent  to  which 
I  have  employed  it.  My  conviction  of  the  power  of 
sexual  selection  remains  unshaken.  .  .  .  When  natural- 
ists have  become  familiar  with  the  idea,  it  will,  as  I 
believe,  be  much  more  largely  accepted;  and  it  has 
already  been  fully  and  favourably  received  by  several 
capable  judges.' 

In  spite  of  the  still  continued  demurrer  of  not  a  few 
among  the  leading  evolutionists,  it  is  probable,  I  think, 
that  Darwin's  prophecy  on  this  matter  will  yet  be  justi- 
fied by  the  verdict  of  time.  For  the  opposition  to  the 
doctrine  of  sexual  selection  proceeds  almost  invariably, 
as  it  seems  to  me,  from  those  persons  who  still  desire 
to  erect  an  efiicient  barrier  of  one  sort  or  another 
between  the  human  and  animal  worlds ;  while  on  the 
contrary  the  theory  in  question  is  almost  if  not  quite 
universally  accepted  by  just  those  rigorously  evolutionary 
biologists  who  are  freest  from  preconceptions  or  special 
a  priori  teleological  objections  of  any  kind  whatever. 
The  half  of  the  doctrine  which  deals  with  the  law  of 
battle,  indeed,  can  hardly  be  doubted  by  any  competent 
naturalist ;  the  other  half,  which  deals  with  the  supposed 
aesthetic  preferences  of  the  females,  is,  no  doubt,  dis- 
tasteful to  certain  thinkers  because  it  seems  to  imply 
the  existence  in  the  lower  animals  of  a  sense  of  beauty 
which  many  among  us  are  not  even  now  prepared  gene- 


The  Theory  of  Courtship  153 

rously  to  admit.  The  desire  to  arrogate  to  mankind 
alone  all  the  higher  faculties  either  of  sense  or  intellect 
has  probably  much  to  do  with  the  current  disinclina- 
tion towards  the  Darwinian  idea  of  sexual  selection. 
Thinkers  who  allow  themselves  to  be  emotionally  swayed 
by  such  extraneous  considerations  forget  that  the  beau- 
tiful is  merely  that  which  pleases ;  that  beauty  has  no 
external  objective  existence ;  and  that  the  range  of 
taste,  both  among  ourselves  and  among  animals  at  large, 
is  practically  infinite.  The  greatest  blow  ever  aimed  at 
the  Darwinian  theory  of  sexual  selection  was  undoubt- 
edly that  dealt  out  by  Mr.  Alfred  Russel  Wallace  (et 
tu,  Brute !)  in  his  able  and  subtle  article  on  the  Colours 
of  Animals  in  '  Macmillan's  Magazine,'  since  reprinted 
in  his  delightful  work  on  '  Tropical  Nature.'  Wallace 
there  urges  with  his  usual  acuteness,  ingenuity,  and 
skill  several  fundamental  objections  to  the  Darwinian 
hypothesis  of  no  little  importance  and  weight.  But  it 
must  always  be  remembered  (with  all  due  respect  to 
the  joint  discoverer  of  natural  selection)  that  Mr. 
Wallace  himself,  after  publishing  his  own  admirable 
essay  on  the  development  of  man,  drew  back  aghast  in 
the  end  from  the  full  consequences  of  his  own  admission, 
and  uttered  his  partial  recantation  in  the  singular  words, 
'  Natural  selection  could  only  have  endowed  the  savage 
with  a  brain  a  little  superior  to  that  of  an  ape.'  It 
seems  probable  that  in  every  case  an  analogous  desire 
to  erect  a  firm  barrier  between  man  and  brute  by 
positing  the  faculty  for  perceiving  beauty  as  a  special 
quasi-divine  differentia  of  the  human  race  has  been  at 
the  bottom  of  the  still  faintly  surviving  dislike  amongst 
a  section  of  scientific  men  to  sexual  selection. 


154  Charles  Darwin 

Nevertheless,  a  candid  and  impartial  critic  would  be 
compelled  frankly  to  admit  that  Darwin's  admirable 
theory  of  courtship  has  not  on  the  whole  proved  so  gene- 
rally acceptable  to  the  biological  world  up  to  the  present 
time  as  his  greater  and  far  more  comprehensive  theory 
of  survival  of  the  fittest.  It  still  waits  for  its  final 
recognition,  towards  which  it  is  progi'essing  more 
rapidly  and  surely  every  day  it  lives. 


CHAPTER  X. 

VICTORY   AND    REST. 

The  last  eleven  years  of  Darwin's  life  were  spent  in  en- 
forcing and  developing  the  principles  already  reached, 
and  in  enjoying  the  almost  unchequered  progress  of  the 
revolution  he  had  so  unconsciously  to  himself  succeeded 
in  inaugurating. 

Only  one  year  elapsed  between  the  publication  of 
the  '  Descent  of  Man '  and  that  of  its  next  important 
successor,  the '  Expression  of  the  Emotions.'  The  occa- 
sion of  this  learned  and  bulky  treatise  in  itself  stands 
as  an  immortal  proof  of  the  conscientious  way  in  which 
Danvin  went  to  work  to  anticipate  the  slightest  and 
most  comparatively  impertinent  possible  objections  to 
his  main  theories.  Sir  Charles  Bell,  in  one  of  the 
quaintly  antiquated  Bridgwater  treatises — those  mar- 
vellous monuments  of  sadly  misplaced  teleological  in- 
genuity— had  maintained  that  man  was  endowed  with 
sundry  small  facial  muscles  solely  for  the  sake  of  ex- 
pressing his  emotions.  This  view  was  so  obviously 
opposed  to  the  belief  in  the  descent  of  man  from  some 
lower  form,  'that,'  says  Darwin,  'it  was  necessary  for 
me  to  consider  it ; '  and  so  he  did,  in  a  lengthy  work, 
where  the  whole   subject  is  exhaustively  treated,  and 


156  Charles  Darwin 

Bell's  idea  is  completely  pulverised  by  the  apt  allegation 
of  analogous  expressions  in  the  animal  world.  In  his 
old  age  Darwin  grew,  in  fact,  only  the  more  ceaselessly 
and  wonderfully  industrious.  In  1875,  after  three 
years  of  comparative  silence,  came  the  'Insectivorous 
Plants,'  a  work  full  of  minute  observation  on  the 
habits  and  manners  of  the  sundew,  the  butterwort,  the 
Venus's  fly-catcher,  and  the  various  heterogeneous  bog- 
haunting  species  known  by  the  common  name  of 
pitcher  plants.  The  bare  mass  and  weight  of  the  facts 
which  Darwin  had  collected  for  the  '  Origin  of  Species ' 
might  well-nigh  have  stifled  the  very  existence  of  that 
marvellous  <book :  it  was  lucky  that  the  premature 
publication  of  Wallace's  paper  compelled  him  to  hurry 
on  his  '  brief  abstract,'  for  if  he  had  waited  to  select 
and  arrange  the  whole  series  of  observations  that  he 
finally  published  in  his  various  later  justificatory 
volumes,  we  might  have  looked  in  vain  for  the  great 
systematic  and  organising  work,  which  would  no  doubt 
have  been  '  surcharged  with  its  own  weight,  and 
strangled  with  its  waste  fertility.'  But  the  task  that 
he  himself  best  loved  was  to  watch  in  minute  detail 
the  principles  whose  secret  he  had  penetrated,  and 
whose  reserve  he  had  broken,  working  themselves  out 
before  his  very  eyes,  naked  and  not  ashamed — to  catch 
Actaeon-like  the  undraped  form  of  nature  herself  in  the 
actual  process  of  her  inmost  being.  He  could  patiently 
observe  the  red  and  slimy  hair-glands  of  the  drosera 
closing  slowly  and  remorselessly  round  the  insect  prey, 
and  sucking  from  their  bodies  with  sensitive  tentacles 
the  protoplasmic  juices  denied  to  its  leaves  by  the  poor 
and  boggy  soil,  on  which  alone  its  scanty  rootlets  can 


Victory  and  Rest  157 

properly  tlirlve.  He  could  watch  the  butterwort  curving 
round  the  edges  of  its  wan  green  foliage  upon  the 
captured  limbs  of  fly  or  aphis.  He  could  note  how  the 
serried  mass  of  finger-like  processes  in  the  utricles 
of  the  bladderwort  slowly  absorb  organic  matter 
from  the  larva  of  a  gnat,  or  the  minute  water-insects 
entangled  within  its  living  and  almost  animated  lobster- 
pot.  He  could  track  the  long  line  of  treacherous  honey- 
glands  by  which  the  sarracenia  entices  flies  into  the 
festering  manure-wells  of  its  sticky  pitchers.  The 
minuteness  and  skill  of  all  his  observations  on  these 
lesser  problems  of  natural  selection  inevitably  inspired 
faith  among  outsiders  in  the  cautious  judgment  of  the 
observer  and  experimenter ;  and  day  by  day  throughout 
his  later  years  the  evidence  of  the  popular  acceptance 
of  his  doctrine,  and  of  the  dying  away  of  the  general 
ridicule  with  which  it  was  first  received  by  the  unlearned 
public,  was  very  gratifying  to  the  great  naturalist. 

A  year  later,  in  1876,  came  the  '  Effects  of  Cross 
and  Self  Fertilisation  in  the  Vegetable  Kingdom.'  So 
far  as  regarded  the  world  of  plants,  especially  with  re- 
spect to  its  higher  divisions,  this  work  was  of  immense 
theoretical  importance ;  and  it  also  cast  a  wonderful 
side-light  upon  the  nature  of  that  strange  distinction 
of  sex  which  occurs  both  in  the  vegetable  and  animal 
kingdom,  and  in  each  is  the  concomitant — one  might 
almost  say  the  necessary  concomitant — of  high  develop- 
ment and  complex  organisation.  The  great  result 
attained  by  Darwin  in  his  long  and  toilsome  series  of 
experiments  on  this  interesting  subject  was  the  splendid 
proof  of  the  law  that  cross-fertilisation  produces  finer 
and  healthier  offspring,  while  continuous  self-fertilisa- 


158  Charles  Darwin 

tion  tends  in  the  long  run  to  degradation,  degeneration, 
and  final  extinction. 

Here  as  elsewhere,  however,  Darwin's  principle  does 
not  spring  spontaneous,  like  Athene  from  the  head  of 
Zeus,  a  goddess  full-formed,  uncaused,  inexplicable  :  it 
aiises  gradually  by  a  slow  process  of  development  and 
modification  from  the  previous  investigations  of  earlier 
biologists.  At  the  close  of  the  last  century,  in  the 
terrible  year  of  upheaval  1793,  a  quiet  German  botanist, 
Christian  Konrad  Sprengel  by  name,  published  at 
Berlin  his  long  unheeded  but  intensely  interesting  work 
on  the  'Fertilisation  of  Flowers.'  In  the  summer  of 
1789,  while  all  Europe  was  ablaze  with  the  news  that 
the  Bastile  had  been  stormed,  and  a  new  era  of  humanity 
begun,  the  calm  and  peaceful  Pomeranian  observer  was 
noting  in  his  own  garden  the  curious  fact  that  many 
flowers  are  incapable  of  being  fertilised  without  the 
assistance  of  flying  insects,  which  carry  pollen  from  the 
stamens  of  one  blossom  to  the  sensitive  surface  or 
ovary  of  the  next.  Hence  he  concluded  that  the  secre- 
tion of  honey  or  nectar  in  flowers,  the  contrivances  by 
which  it  is  protected  from  rain,  the  bright  hues  or  lines 
of  the  corolla,  and  the  sweet  perfume  distilled  by  the 
blossoms,  are  all  so  many  cunning  devices  of  nature 
to  ensure  fertilisation  by  the  insect-visitors.  Moreover, 
Sprengel  observed  that  many  flowers  are  of  one  sex  only, 
and  that  in  several  others  the  sexes  do  not  mature 
simultaneously;  'so  that,'  said  he,  'nature  seems  to 
intend  that  no  flower  shall  be  fertilised  by  means  of  its 
own  pollen.'  Indeed,  in  some  instances,  as  he  showed 
by  experiments  upon  the  yellow  day  lily,  plants  impreg- 
nated from  their  own  stamens  cannot  be  made  to  sot 


Victory  and  Rest  159 

seed  at  all,  '  So  near/  says  his  able  successor,  Hermann 
Miiller,  '  was  Sprengel  to  the  distinct  recognition  of  the 
fact  that  self-fertilisation  leads  to  worse  results  than 
cross-fertilisation,  and  that  all  the  arrangements  which 
favour  insect-visits  are  of  value  to  the  plant  itself, 
simply  because  the  insect-visitors  effect  cross-fertilisa- 
tion ! '  As  in  most  other  anticipatory  cases,  however, 
it  must  be  here  remarked  that  Sprengel's  idea  was 
wholly  teleological :  he  conceived  of  nature  as  animated 
by  a  direct  iaforming  principle,  which  deliberately  aimed 
at  a  particular  result ;  whereas  Darwin  rather  came  to 
the  conclusion  that  cross-fertilisation  as  a  matter  of  fact 
does  actually  produce  beneficial  results,  and  that  there- 
fore those  plants  which  varied  most  in  the  direction 
of  arrangements  for  favouring  insect-visits  were  likely 
to  be  exceptionally  fortunate  in  the  struggle  for  exist- 
ence against  competitors  othenvise  arranged.  It  is  just 
the  usual  Darwinian  substitution  of  an  efficient  for  a 
final  cause. 

Even  before  Sprengel,  Kolreuter  had  recognised,  in 
1761,  that  self-fertilisation  was  avoided  in  nature  ;  and 
his  observations  and  experiments  on  intercrossing  and 
on  hybridism  were  largely  relied  upon  by  Darwin  him- 
self, to  whom  they  suggested  at  an  early  period  many 
fruitful  lines  of  original  investigation.  In  1799,  again, 
Andrew  Knight,  following  up  the  same  line  of  thought 
in  England  as  Sprengel  in  Germany,  declared  as  the 
result  of  his  close  experiments  upon  the  garden  pea, 
that  no  plant  ever  fertilises  itself  for  a  perpetuity  ot 
generations.  But  Knight's  law,  not  being  brought 
into  'causal  connection  with  any  great  fundamental 
principle  of  nature,  was  almost  entirely  overlooked  by  the 


i6o  Charles  Darwl^ 

scientific  world  until  the  publication  of  Darwin's  '  Origin 
of  Species,'  half  a  century  later.  The  same  neglect 
also  overtook  Sprengel's  immensely  interesting  and 
curious  work  on  fertilisation  of  flowers.  The  world,  in 
fact,  was  not  yet  ready  for  the  separate  treatment  of 
functional  problems  connected  with  the  interrelations 
of  organic  beings ;  so  Knight  and  Sprengel  were  laid 
aside  unnoticed  on  the  dusty  top  bookshelves  of  public 
libraries,  while  the  dry  classificatory  and  systematic 
biology  of  the  moment  had  it  all  its  own  way  for  the 
time  being  on  the  centre  reading-tables.  So  many 
separate  and  independent  strands  of  thought  does  it 
ultimately  require  to  make  up  the  grand  final  generalisa- 
tion which  the  outer  world  attributes  in  its  totality  to 
the  one  supreme  organising  intelligence. 

But  in  the  '  Origin  of  Species '  itself  Darwin 
reiterated  and  emphasised  Knight's  law  as  a  general 
and  all-pervading  principle  of  nature,  placing  it  at 
the  same  time  on  broader  and  surer  biological  founda- 
tions by  affiliating  it  intimately  upon  his  own 
great  illuminating  and  unifying  doctrine  of  natural 
selection.  He  also  soon  after  rescued  from  oblivion 
Sprengel's  curious  and  fairy-like  book,  showing  in  full 
detail  in  his  work  on  orchids  the  wonderful  contrivances 
by  which  flowers  seek  to  attract  and  to  secure  the  assist- 
ance of  insects  for  the  impregnation  of  their  embryo 
seeds.  In  the  '  Variation  of  Animals  and  Plants  under 
Domestication,'  he  further  showed  that  breeding  in-and- 
in  diminishes  the  strength  and  productiveness  of  the 
offspring ;  while  crossing  with  another  stock  produces, 
on  the  contrary,  the  best  possible  physical  results  in 
both  directions.     And  now  at  last,  in  the  'Efiects  of 


Vjctory  and  Rest  i6i 

Cross  and  Self  Fertilisation,'  he  proved  by  careful  and 
frequently  repeated  experiments  that  a  constant  in- 
fusion of  fresh  blood  (so  to  speak)  is  essential  to  the 
production  of  the  healthiest  offspring.  In  the  words 
of  his  own  emphatic  summing  up,  '  Nature  abhors  per- 
petual self-fertilisation.' 

The  immediate  result  of  these  new  statements  and 
this  fresh  rationale  of  Knight's  law  was  to  bring  down 
Sprengel  forthwith  from  the  top  shelf,  where  he  had 
languished  ingloriously  for  seventy  years,  and  to  set  a 
whole  school  of  ardent  botanical  observers  working  hard 
in  the  lines  he  had  laid  down  upon  the  mutual  corre- 
lations of  insects  and  flowers.  A  vast  literature  sprang 
up  at  once  upon  this  enchanting  and  long-neglected 
subject,  the  most  eminent  workers  in  the  rediscovered 
field  being  Delpino  in  Italy,  Hildebrand  and  Hermann 
Miiller  in  Germany,  Axel  in  Sweden,  Lubbock  in 
England,  and  Fritz  Miiller  in  tropical  South  America. 
Darwin  found  the  question,  in  fact,  almost  taken  out  of 
his  hands  before  he  had  time  himself  to  treat  of  it ;  for 
Hildebrand's  chief  work  was  published  as  early  as  1867, 
while  Axel's  appeared  in  1869,  both  of  them  several 
years  earlier  than  Darwin's  own  final  essay  on  the 
subject  in  the  '  Effects  of  Cross  and  Self  Fertilisation.' 
No  statement,  perhaps,  could  more  clearly  mark  the 
enormous  impetus  given  to  researches  in  this  direction 
than  the  fact  that  D'Arcy  Thompson,  in  his  appendix 
to  Miiller's  splendid  work  on  the  '  Fertilisation  of 
Flowers,'  has  collected  a  list  of  no  less  than  eight  hun- 
dred and  fourteen  separate  works  or  important  papers 
bearing  on  that  special  department  of  botany,  almost 
all  of  them  subsequent  in  date  to  the  first  publication 
15 


1 62  Charles  Darwin 

of  the  *  Origin  of  Species.'  So  widely  did  the  Darwinian 
wave  extend,  and  so  profoundly  did  it  affect  every 
minute  point  of  biological  and  psychological  investiga- 
tion. 

Each  of  these  later  works  of  Darwin's  consists,  as  a 
rule,  of  an  expansion  of  some  single  chapter  or  para- 
graph in  the  '  Origin  of  Species ; '  or,  to  speak  more 
correctly,  of  an  arrangement  of  the  materials  collected 
and  the  experiments  designed  for  that  particular  portion 
of  the  great  projected  encyclopaedia  of  evolutionism,  of 
which  the  '  Origin  of  Species '  itself  was  but  a  brief 
anticipatory  summary  or  rough  outline.  Thus,  the  book 
on  Orchids,  published  in  1862,  is  already  foreshadowed 
in  a  part  of  the  chapter  on  the  Difficulties  of  the  Theory 
of  Natural  Selection;  the  'Movements  and  Habits  of 
Climbing  Plants'  (1865)  is  briefly  summarised  by 
anticipation  in  the  long  section  on  Modes  of  Transition ; 
the  *  Variation  of  Animals  and  Plants  under  Domesti- 
cation' (1868)  consists  of  the  vast  array  of  pieces 
justificatives  for  the  first  chapter  of  the  '  Origin  of 
Species ; '  and  the  germ  of  the  '  Cross  and  Self  Fertili- 
sation' (1876)  is  to  be  seen  in  the  passage  'On  the 
Intercrossing  of  Individuals '  in  Chapter  IV.  of  the 
same  work.  It  was  well  indeed  that  Darwin  began  by 
publishing  the  shorter  and  more  manageable  abstract ; 
the  half,  as  the  wise  Greek  proverb  shrewdly  remarks, 
is  often  more  than  the  whole ;  and  a  world  that  eagerly 
devoured  the  first  great  deliverance  of  the  Darwinian 
principle,  might  have  stood  aghast  had  it  been  asked  to 
swallow  it  piecemeal  in  such  gigantic  treatises  as  those 
with  which  its  author  afterwards  sought  thrice  to  van- 
quish all  his  foes  and  thrice  to  slay  the  slain. 


Victory  and  Rest  163 

Yet,  with  each  fresh  manifestation  of  Darwin's  in- 
exhaustible resources,  on  the  other  hand,  the  opposition 
to  his  principles  grew  feebler  and  feebler,  and  the 
universality  of  their  acceptance  more  and  more  pro- 
nounced, till  at  last,  among  biologists  at  least,  not  to  be 
a  Darwinian  was  equivalent  to  being  hopelessly  left 
behind  by  the  general  onward  movement  of  the  time. 
In  18 74  Tyndall  delivered  his  famous  address  at  the 
Belfast  meeting  of  the  British  Association  ;  and  in  1877, 
from  the  same  presidential  chair  at  Plymouth,  Allen 
Thomson,  long  reputed  a  doubtful  waverer,  enforced  his 
cordial  adhesion  to  the  Darwinian  principles  by  his 
inaugural  discourse  on  '  The  Development  of  the  Forms 
of  Animal  Life.'  A  new  generation  of  active  workers, 
trained  up  from  the  first  in  the  evolutionary  school,  like 
Romanes,  Eay  Lankester,  Thistleton  Dyer,  Balfour, 
Sully,  and  Moggridge,  had  now  risen  gradually  around 
the  great  master ;  and  in  every  direction  he  could  see 
the  seed  he  had  himself  planted  being  watered  and 
nourished  in  fresh  soil  by  a  hundred  ardent  and 
enthusiastic  young  disciples.  Even  in  France,  ever 
irresponsive  to  the  touch  of  new  ideas  of  alien  origin, 
Colonel  Moulinie's  admirable  and  sympathetic  transla- 
tions were  beginning  to  win  over  to  the  evolutionary 
creed  many  rising  workers ;  while  in  Germany,  Victor 
Carus's  excellent  versions  had  from  the  very  first  brought 
in  the  enthusiastic  Teutonic  biologists  with  a  congenial 
'  swarmery '  to  the  camp  of  the  Darwinians.  Corre- 
spondents from  every  part  of  the  world  kept  pressing 
fresh  facts  and  fresh  applications  upon  the  founder  of 
the  faith  ;  and  Darwin  saw  his  own  work  so  fast  being 
taken  out  of  his  hands  by  specialist  disciples  that  he 


1 64  Charles  Darwin 

abandoned  entirely  his  original  intention  of  publishing 
in  detail  the  basis  of  his  first  book,  and  contented  him- 
self instead  with  tracing  out  minutely  some  minor 
portions  of  his  contemplated  task  as  specimens  of  evo- 
lutionary method. 

In  1877,  in  pursuance  of  this  changed  purpose, 
Darwin  published  his  book  on  '  Forms  of  Flowers,'  in 
which  he  dealt  closely  with  the  old  problem  of  diJBfer- 
ently  shaped  blossoms  on  plants  of  the  same  species. 
It  had  long  been  known,  to  take  a  single  example,  that 
primroses  existed  in  two  forms,  the  pin-eyed  and  the 
thrum-eyed,  of  which  the  former  has  the  pin-like 
summit  of  the  pistil  at  the  top  of  the  tube,  and  the 
stamens  concealed  half  way  down  its  throat ;  while  in 
the  latter  these  relative  positions  are  exactly  reversed, 
the  stamens  answering  in  place  to  the  pistil  of  the 
alternative  form  with  geometrical  accuracy.  As  early 
as  1862  Darwin  had  shown,  in  the  'Journal  of  the 
Linnean  Society,'  that  this  curious  arrangement  owed 
its  development  to  the  greater  secuiity  which  it  afforded 
for  cross-fertilisation,  because  in  this  way  each  flower 
had  to  be  impregnated  with  the  pollen  from  a  totally 
distinct  blossom,  growing  on  a  different  individual 
plant.  In  a  series  of  successive  papers  read  before  the 
same  Society  in  the  years  between  1863  and  1868,  he 
had  extended  a  similar  course  of  explanation  to  the 
multiform  flowers  of  the  flaxes,  the  loosestrifes,  the 
featherfoil,  the  auricula,  the  buckbean,  and  several  other 
well-known  plants.  At  last,  in  1877,  he  gathered  to- 
gether into  one  of  the  now  familiar  green-covered 
volumes  the  whole  of  his  observations  on  this  strange 
peculiarity,  and  proved  by  abundant  illustration  and 


Victory  and  Rest  165 

experiment  that  the  diversity  of  form  is  always  due 
through  natural  selection  to  the  advantage  gained  by 
perfect  security  of  cross-fertilisation,  resulting  as  it 
invariably  does  in  the  production  of  the  finest,  strongest, 
and  most  successful  seedlings.  Any  variation,  however 
peculiar,  which  helps  to  ensure  this  constant  infusion  of 
fresh  blood  is  certain  to  be  favoured  in  the  struggle  for 
life,  owing  to  the  superior  vitality  of  the  stock  it  begets. 
But  it  is  worthy  of  notice,  as  showing  the  extreme 
minuteness  and  exhaustiveness  of  Darwin's  method  on 
the  small  scale,  side  by  side  with  his  extraordinary  and 
unusual  power  of  rising  to  the  very  highest  and  grandest 
generalisations,  that  the  volume  which  he  devoted  to 
the  elucidation  of  this  minor  factor  in  the  question  of 
hereditary  advantages  runs  to  nearly  as  many  pages  as 
the  last  edition  of  the  '■  Origin  of  Species '  itself.  So 
great  was  the  wealth  of  observation  and  experiment 
which  he  could  lavish  upon  the  solution  of  a  single, 
small,  incidental  problem. 

Even  fuller  in  minute  original  research  was  the 
work  which  Darwin  published  in  1880,  on  'The  Power 
of  Movement  in  Plants,'  detailing  the  result  of  innu- 
merable observations  on  the  seemingly  irresponsible  yet 
almost  purposive  rotations  of  the  growing  rootlets  and 
young  stems  of  peas  and  climbers.  Anyone  who  wishes 
to  see  on  what  a  wide  foundation  of  irrefragable  fact 
the  great  biologist  built  up  the  stately  fabric  of  his  vast 
theories  cannot  do  better  than  turn  for  instruction  to 
this  remarkable  volume,  which  the  old  naturalist  gave  to 
the  world  some  time  after  passing  the  allotted  span  of 
threescore  years  and  ten. 

It  was  in  the  same  year  (1880)  that  Huxley  delivered 


1 66  Charles  Darwin 

at  the  Eoyal  Institution  his  famous  address  on  the 
Coming  of  Age  of  the  '  Origin  of  Species.'  The  time 
was  a  favourable  one  for  reviewing  the  silent  and  almost 
unobserved  progress  of  a  great  revolution.  Twenty- 
one  years  had  come  and  gone  since  the  father  of  modem 
scientific  evolutionism  had  launched  upon  the  world  his 
tentative  work.  In  those  twenty-one  years  the  thought 
of  humanity  had  been  twisted  around  as  upon  some 
invisible  pivot,  and  a  new  heaven  and  a  new  earth  had 
been  presented  to  the  eyes  of  seers  and  thinkers.  One- 
and-twenty  years  before,  despite  the  influence  of  Hutton 
and  of  Lyell,  the  dominant  view  of  the  earth's  past 
history  revealed  but  one  vast  and  lawless  succession  of 
hideous  catastrophes.  Wholesale  creations  and  whole- 
sale extinctions,  Avorld-wide  cataclysms  followed  by  fresh 
world-wide  births  of  interwoven  faunas  and  floras — 
these,  said  Huxley,  were  the  ordinary  machinery  of  the 
geological  epic  bz'ought  into  fashion  by  the  misapplied 
genius  of  the  mighty  Cuvier.  One-and-twenty  years 
after,  the  opponents  themselves  had  given  up  the  game 
in  its  fullest  form  as  lost  beyond  the  hope  of  possible 
restitution.  Some  hesitating  thinkers,  it  is  true,  while 
accepting  the  evolutionary  doctrine  more  or  less  in  its 
earlier  form,  like  Mivart  and  Meehan,  yet  refused  their 
assent  on  one  ground  or  another  to  the  specific  Darwinian 
doctrine  of  natural  selection.  Others,  like  Wallace, 
made  a  special  exception  with  regard  to  the  development 
of  the  human  species,  which  they  supposed  to  be  due  to 
other  causes  from  those  implied  in  the  remainder  of  the 
organic  scale.  Yet  on  the  whole,  biological  science  had 
fairly  carried  the  day  in  favour  of  evolution,  in  one  form 
or  another,  and  not  even  the  cavillers  dared  now  to  sug- 


Victory  and  Rest  167 

gest  that  whole  systems  of  creation  had  been  swept  away 
en  bloc,  and  remade  again  in  different  forms  for  a  suc- 
ceeding epoch,  in  accordance  with  the  belief  which  was 
almost  universal  among  geologists  up  to  the  exact  mo- 
ment of  the  publication  of  Darwin's  masterpiece. 

During  the  twenty-one  years,  too,  as  Huxley  like- 
wise pointed  out,  an  immense  number  of  new  facts  had 
come  to  strengthen  the  hands  of  the  evolutionists  at 
the  very  point  where  they  had  before  felt  themselves 
most  openly  vulnerable.  Palseontology  had  supplied 
many  of  those  missing  links  in  the  organic  chain  whose 
absence  from  the  interrupted  and  imperfect  geological 
record  had  been  loudly  alleged  against  the  Darwinian 
hypothesis  in  the  earlier  days  of  struggle  and  hesita- 
tion. Two  years  after  the  publication  of  the  '  Origin 
of  Species,'  the  discovery  of  a  winged  and  feathered 
creature,  happily  preserved  for  us  in  the  Solenhofen 
slates,  with  li'.ard-like  head  and  teeth  and  tail,  and 
bird-like  pinions,  feet,  and  breast,  had  bridged  over  in 
part  the  great  gap  that  yawns  between  the  existing 
birds  and  reptiles.  A  few  years  later,  new  fossil 
reptilian  forms,  erect  on  their  hind  legs  like  kangaroos, 
and  with  very  singular  peculiarities  of  bony  structure, 
had  helped  still  further  to  show  the  nature  of  the  modi- 
fications by  which  the  scale-bearing  quadruped  type 
passed  slowly  into  that  of  the  feather-bearing  biped. 
In  1875,  again.  Professor  Marsh's  discovery  of  the 
toothed  birds  in  the  American  cretaceous  strata  com- 
pleted the  illustrative  series  of  transitional  forms  over 
what  had  once  been  the  most  remarkable  existing  break 
in  the  continuity  of  organic  development.  Similarly, 
Hofmeister's    investigations    in    the    vegetable  world 


1 68  Charles  Darwin 

brought  close  together  the  flowering  and  flowerless 
plants,  by  indicating  that  the  ferns  and  the  horsetails 
were  connected  in  curious  unforeseen  ways,  through  the 
pill-worts  and  club-mosses,  with  the  earliest  and 
simplest  of  forest  trees,  the  firs  and  the  puzzle-monkeys. 
In  minor  matters  like  progress  was  continually  re- 
ported on  every  side.  Gaudry  found  among  the  fossils 
of  Attica  the  successive  stages  by  which  the  ancient 
and  undeveloped  civets  passed  into  the  more  modern 
and  specialised  tribe  of  the  hyaenas ;  Marsh  traced  out 
in  Western  America  the  ancestry  of  the  horse  from  a 
five-toed  creature  no  bigger  than  a  fox,  through  inter- 
mediate four-toed  and  three-toed  forms,  to  the  existing 
single  solid-hoofed  type  with  its  digits  reduced  to  the 
minimum  of  unity ;  and  Filhol  unearthed  among  the 
phosphorites  of  Quercy  the  common  progenitor  of  the 
most  distinct  among  the  recent  carnivores,  the  cats  and 
the  dogs,  the  plantigrade  bears  and  the  digitigrade  pumas. 
*  So  far  as  the  animal  world  is  concerned,'  Professor 
Huxley  said  in  conclusion,  reviewing  these  additions  to 
the  evidence  upon  that  memorable  occasion,  '  evolution 
is  no  longer  a  speculation  but  a  statement  of  historical 
fact.'  Of  Darwin  himself  he  remarked  truly,  '  He  has 
lived  long  enough  to  outlast  detraction  and  opposition, 
and  to  see  the  stone  that  the  builders  rejected  become 
the  head-stone  of  the  corner.' 

It  was  in  1881  that  Darwin  published  his  last 
volume,  'The  Formation  of  Vegetable  Mould  through 
the  Action  of  Worms.'  In  this  singularly  fascinating 
and  interesting  monograph  he  took  in  hand  one  of  the 
lowliest  and  humblest  of  living  forms,  the  common 
earthworm,  and  by  an  exhaustive  study  of  its  habits 


Victory  and  Rest  169 

and  manners  strove  to  show  how  the  entire  existence  of 
vegetable  mould — the  ordinary  covering  of  fertile  soil 
upon  the  face  of  the  earth — is  due  to  the  long  but  un- 
obtrusive action  of  these  little-noticed  and  ever-active 
architects.  By  the  acids  which  they  evolve,  they  appear 
to  aid  largely  in  the  disintegration  of  the  stone  beneath 
the  surface  j  by  their  constant  practice  of  eating  fallen 
leaves,  which  they  drag  down  with  them  into  their 
subterranean  burrows,  they  produce  the  fine  castings  of 
soft  earth,  so  familiar  to  everybody,  and  thus  reinstate 
the  coating  of  humus  above  the  bare  rock  as  often  as  it  is 
washed  away  again  in  the  course  of  ordinary  denudation 
by  the  rain  and  the  torrents.  It  is  true  that  subsequent 
investigation  has  shown  the  possibility  of  vegetable 
mould  existing  under  certain  conditions  without  the 
intervention  of  worms  to  any  marked  extent ;  but,  as  a 
whole,  there  can  be  little  doubt  that  over  most  parts  of 
the  world  the  presence  of  soil,  and  therefore  of  the  vege- 
table growth  rooted  in  it,  is  entirely  due  to  the  unsus- 
pected yet  ceaseless  activity  of  these  humble  creatures. 
The  germ  of  the  earthworm  theory  appears  to  me  to 
have  been  first  suggested  to  Darwin's  mind  by  a  passage 
in  a  work  where  one  would  little  have  suspected  it — 
White's  '  Natural  History  of  Selborne.'  '  Earthworms,' 
says  the  idyllic  Hampshire  naturalist,  'though  in  ap- 
pearance a  small  and  despicable  link  in  the  chain  of 
nature,  yet,  if  lost,  would  make  a  lamentable  chasm. 
For  to  say  nothing  of  half  the  birds,  and  some  quad- 
rupeds, which  are  almost  entirely  supported  by  them, 
worms  seem  to  be  the  great  promoters  of  vegetation, 
which  would  proceed  but  lamely  without  them,  by 
boring,  perforating,  and  loosening  the  soil,  and  rendering 


170  Charles  Darwin 

it  pervious  to  rains  and  the  fibres  of  plants,  by  drawing 
straws  and  stalks  of  leaves  into  it ;  and,  most  of  all,  by 
throwing  up  such  infinite  numbers  of  lumps  of  earth, 
called  worm-casts,  which,  being  their  excrement,  is  a 
fine  manure  for  grain  and  grass.  Worms  probably 
provide  new  soils  for  hills  and  slopes  where  the  rain 
washes  the  earth  away ;  and  they  affect  slopes,  probably, 
to  avoid  being  flooded.  Gardeners  and  farmers  express 
their  detestation  of  worms ;  the  former,  because  they 
render  their  walks  unsightly,  and  make  them  much 
work;  and  the  latter,  because,  as  they  think,  worms 
eat  their  green  corn.  But  these  men  would  find,  that 
the  earth  without  worms  would  soon  become  cold,  hard- 
bound, and  void  of  fermentation ;  and,  consequently, 
sterile.' 

If  Darwin  ever  read  this  interesting  passage,  which 
he  almost  certainly  must  at  some  time  have  done,  it 
would  appear  that  he  had  overlooked  it  in  later  life ; 
for  he,  who  was  habitually  so  candid  and  careful  in  the 
acknowledgment  of  all  his  obligations,  however  great 
or  however  small,  does  not  make  any  mention  of  it  at 
all  in  his  '  Vegetable  Mould,'  though  he  alludes  inci- 
dentally to  some  other  observations  of  Gilbert  White's 
on  the  minor  habits  and  manners  of  earthworms.  But 
whether  Darwin  was  originally  indebted  to  White  or 
not  for  the  foundation  of  his  theory  on  the  subject  of 
mould,  the  important  point  to  notice  is  really  this,  that 
what  with  the  observant  parson  of  Selborne  was  but  a 
casual  glimpse,  the  mere  passing  suggestion  of  a  fruit- 
ful idea,  became  with  Darwin,  in  his  wider  fashion,  a 
carefully  elaborated  and  powerfully  buttressed  theory, 
supported   by   long   and  patient  investigation,  ample 


Victory  and  Rest  171 

experiment,  and  vast  collections  of  minute  facts.  The 
difference  is  strikingly  characteristic  of  the  strong  point 
of  Darwin's  genius.  While  he  had  all  the  breadth  and 
universality  of  the  profoundest  thinkers,  he  had  also  all 
the  marvellous  and  inexhaustible  patience  of  the  most 
precise  and  special  microscopical  student. 

For  years,  indeed,  Darwin  studied  the  ways  and 
instincts  of  the  common  earthworm  with  the  same  close 
and  accurate  observation  which  he  gave  to  every  other 
abstruse  subject  that  engaged  in  any  way  his  acute 
intellect.  The  lawyer's  maxim,  '  De  minimis  lex  non 
curat,'  he  used  to  say,  never  truly  applies  to  science. 
As  early  as  the  year  1837  he  read  a  paper,  before  the 
Geological  Society  of  London,  '  On  the  Formation  of 
Mould,'  in  which  he  developed  with  some  fulness  the 
mother  idea  of  his  complete  theory  on  the  earthworm 
question.  He  there  showed  that  layers  of  cinders,  marl, 
or  ashes,  which  had  been  strewn  thickly  over  the  surface 
of  meadows,  were  found  a  few  years  after  at  a  depth  of 
some  inches  beneath  the  tuif,  yet  still  forming  in  spite 
of  their  burial  a  regular  and  fairly  horizontal  stratum. 
This  apparent  sinking  of  the  stones,  he  believed,  was 
due  to  the  quantity  of  fine  earth  brought  up  to  the 
surface  by  worms  in  the  form  of  castings.  It  was  ob- 
jected to  his  theory  at  the  time  that  the  work  supposed 
to  be  accomplished  by  the  worms  was  out  of  all  reason- 
able proportion  to  the  size  and  numbers  of  the  alleged 
actors.  Here  Darwin's  foot  was  on  his  native  heath ; 
he  felt  himself  immediately  on  solid  ground  again. 
The  cumulative  importance  of  separately  infinitesimal 
elements  is  indeed  the  very  keynote  and  special  pecu- 
liarity of  the  great  biologist's  method  of  thinking.     He 


172  Charles  Darww 

had  found  out  in  very  truth  that  many  a  little  makes  a 
mickle,  that  the  infinitely  small,  infinitely  repeated, 
may  become  in  process  of  infinite  years  infinitely  im- 
portant. So  he  set  himself  to  work,  with  characteristic 
contempt  of  time,  to  weigh  and  measure  worms  and 
worm-castings. 

He  began  by  keeping  tame  earthworms  in  flower- 
pots in  his  own  house,  counting  the  number  of  worms 
and  burrows  in  certain  measured  spaces  of  pasture  or 
garden,  and  starting  his  long  and  slow  experiment  in 
his  field  at  Down  already  alluded  to.  He  tried  issues 
on  their  senses,  on  their  instincts,  on  their  emotions, 
on  their  intelligence ;  he  watched  them  darting  wildly 
like  rabbits  into  their  holes  when  alarmed  from  without, 
overcoming  engineering  diflBculties  in  dragging  down 
oddly-shaped  or  unfamiliar  leaves,  and  protecting  the 
open  mouths  of  their  tunnels  from  intruders  with  a  little 
defensive  military  glacis  of  rounded  pebbles.  He  found 
that  more  than  53,000  worms  on  an  average  inhabit 
every  acre  of  garden  land,  and  that  a  single  casting 
sometimes  weighs  as  much  as  three  ounces  avoirdupois. 
Ten  tons  of  soil  per  acre  pass  annually  through  their 
bodies,  and  mould  is  thrown  up  by  them  at  an  average 
rate  of  22  inches  in  a  century.  Careful  observations 
on  the  stones  of  Stonehenge;  on  the  tiled  floors  of 
buried  buildings;  on  Roman  ruins  at  Silchester  and 
Wroxeter,  and  on  his  own  meadows  and  pastures  at 
Down,  finally  enabled  the  cautious  experimenter  to 
prove  conclusively  the  truth  of  his  thesis,  and  to  present 
to  the  world  the  despised  earthworm  in  a  new  character, 
as  the  friend  of  man  and  of  agriculture,  the  producer 
and  maintainer  of  the  veoretable  mould  on  our  hills  or 


Victory  and  Rest  173 

valleys,  and  the  prime  cause  of  the  very  existence  of 
that  cloak  of  greensward  that  clothes  our  lawns,  our 
fields,  and  our  pleasure-grounds. 

It  was  his  last  work.  Persistent  ill-health  and 
equally  persistent  study  for  seventy-three  years  had 
broken  down  a  constitution  never  really  strong,  and 
consumed  from  within  by  the  ceaseless  fires  of  its  own 
overpowering  and  undying  energy.  On  Tuesday,  April 
the  18th,  1882,  he  was  seized  at  midnight  by  violent 
pains,  and  at  four  o'clock  on  Wednesday  afternoon  he 
died  suddenly  in  his  son's  arms,  after  a  very  short  but 
painful  illness.  So  retired  was  the  family  life  at  Down 
that  the  news  of  the  great  biologist's  death  was  not 
actually  known  in  London  itself  till  two  days  after 
he  had  breathed  his  last. 

The  universal  regret  and  gi'ief  expressed  at  the  loss 
in  all  civilised  countries  was  the  best  measure  of  the 
immense  change  of  front  which  had  slowly  come  over 
the  whole  educated  community,  in  the  twenty-three 
years  since  the  first  publication  of  the  '  Origin  of 
Species.'  No  sooner  was  Darwin's  death  announced 
than  all  lands  and  all  classes  vied  with  one  another  in 
their  eagerness  to  honour  the  name  and  memory  of  the 
great  biologist.  Indeed,  the  spontaneous  and  immediate 
nature  of  the  outburst  of  regret  and  affectionate  regard 
which  followed  hard  upon  the  news  of  Darwin's  death, 
astonished  even  those  who  had  watched  closely  the 
extraordinary  revolution  the  man  himself  had  brought 
so  well  to  its  final  consummation.  In  England,  it  was 
felt  instinctively  on  every  side  that  the  great  naturalist's 
proper  place  was  in  the  aisles  of  Westminster,  hard  by 
the  tomb  of  Newton,  his  immortal  predecessor.  To 
16 


174  Charles  Darwin 

tliis  universal  and  deep-seated  feeling  Darwin's  family 
regretfully  sacrificed  their  own  natural  preference  for  a 
quiet  interment  in  the  graveyard  at  Down.  On  the 
Wednesday  morning  next  after  his  death,  Charles 
Darwin's  remains  were  borne  with  unwonted  marks  of 
respect  and  ceremony,  in  the  assembled  presence  of  all 
that  was  noble  and  good  in  Britain,  to  an  honoured 
grave  in  the  precincts  of  the  great  Abbey.  Wallace 
and  Huxley,  Lubbock  and  Hooker,  his  nearest  peers  iu 
the  domain  of  pure  science,  stood  among  the  bearers  who 
held  the  pall.  Lowell  represented  the  republics  of 
America  and  of  letters.  Statesmen,  and  poets,  and  phi- 
losophers, and  theologians  mingled  with  the  throng  of 
scientific  thinkers  who  crowded  close  around  the  vene- 
rated bier.  No  incident  of  fitting  pomp  or  dignity  was 
wanting  as  the  organ  pealed  out  in  solemn  strains  the 
special  anthem  composed  for  the  occasion,  to  the  appro- 
priate words  of  the  Hebrew  poet,  '  Happy  is  the  man 
that  findeth  wisdom.'  Even  the  narrow  Philistine 
intelligence  itself,  which  still  knew  Darwin  only  as  the 
man  who  thought  we  were  all  descended  from  monkeys, 
was  impressed  with  the  sole  standard  of  greatness  open 
to  its  feeble  and  shallow  comprehension  by  the  mere 
solemnity  and  ceremony  of  the  occasion,  and  began  to 
enquire  with  blind  wonderment  what  this  thinker  had 
done  whom  a  whole  people  thus  delighted  to  honour. 

Of  Darwin's  pure  and  exalted  moral  nature  no 
Englishman  of  the  present  generation  can  trust  himself 
to  speak  with  becoming  moderation.  His  love  of  truth, 
his  singleness  of  heart,  his  sincerity,  his  earnestness, 
his  modesty,  his  candour,  his  absolute  sinking  of  self  and 
selfishness — these,  indeed,  are  all  conspicuous  to  every 


Victory  and  Rest  175 

reader,  on  the  very  face  of  every  word  he  ever  printed. 
Like  his  works  themselves,  they  must  long  outlive  him. 
But  his  sympathetic  kindliness,  his  ready  generosity,  the 
staunchness  of  his  friendship,  the  width  and  depth  and 
breadth  of  his  affections,  the  manner  in  which  '  he  bore 
with  those  who  blamed  him  unjustly  without  blaming 
them  in  return,'  these  things  can  never  so  well  be  known 
to  any  other  generation  of  men  as  to  the  three  genera- 
tions who  walked  the  world  with  him.  Many  even  of 
those  who  did  not  know  him  loved  him  like  a  father ;  to 
many  who  never  saw  his  face,  the  hope  of  winning 
Charles  Darwin's  approbation  and  regard  was  the  high- 
est incentive  to  thought  and  action.  Towards  younger 
men.  especially,  his  unremitting  kindness  was  always 
most  noteworthy  :  he  spoke  and  wrote  to  them,  not 
like  one  of  the  masters  in  Israel,  but  like  a  fellow- 
worker  and  seeker  after  truth,  interested  in  their 
interests,  pleased  at  their  successes,  sympathetic  with 
their  failures,  gentle  to  their  mistakes.  Not  that  he  ever 
spared  rightful  criticism ;  on  the  contrary,  the  love  of 
truth  was  with  him  so  overpowering  and  enthralling 
a  motive  that  he  pointed  out  what  seemed  to  him  errors 
or  misconceptions  in  the  work  of  others  with  perfect 
frankness,  fully  expecting  them  to  be  as  pleased  and 
delighted  at  a  suggested  amendment  of  their  faulty 
writinsr  as  he  himself  was  in  his  own  case.  But  his 
praise  was  as  generous  as  his  criticism  was  frank ;  and, 
amid  all  the  toil  of  his  laborious  life  in  his  study  at 
Down,  he  could,  always  find  time  to  read  and  comment 
at  full  length  upon  whatever  fresh  contributions  to  his 
own  subjects  the  merest  tyro  might  venture  to  submit 
for  his  consideration.     He  had  the  sympathetic  recep- 


176  Charles  Darwin 

tivity  of  all  truly  great  minds,  and  wlien  he  died, 
thousands  upon  thousands  who  had  never  beheld  his 
serene  features  and  his  fatherly  eyes  felt  they  had  lost 
indeed  a  personal  fi-iend. 

Greatness  is  not  always  joined  with  gentleness :  in 
Charles  Darwin's  case,  by  universal  consent  of  all  who 
knew  him,  '  an  intellect  which  had  no  superior '  was 
wedded  to  '  a  character  even  nobler  than  the  intellect.* 


CHAPTER  XI. 
Darwin's  place  in  the  evolutionary  movement. 

To  most  people  Darwinism  and  evolution  mean  one 
and  the  same  thing.  After  what  has  here  been  said, 
however,  with  regard  to  the  pre-Darwinian  evolutionary 
movement,  and  the  distinction  between  the  doctrines  of 
descent  with  modification  and  of  natural  selection,  it 
need  hardly  be  added  that  the  two  are  quite  separate 
and  separable  in  thought,  even  within  the  limits  of  the 
purely  restricted  biological  order.  Darwinism  is  only  a 
part  of  organic  evolution ;  the  theory,  as  a  whole,  owes 
much  to  Darwin,  but  it  does  not  owe  everything  to  him 
alone.  There  were  biological  evolutionists  before  ever 
he  published  the  '  Origin  of  Species ; '  there  are  bio- 
logical evolutionists  even  now  who  refuse  to  accept  the 
truth  of  his  great  discovery,  and  who  cling  firmly  to 
the  primitive  faith  set  forth  in  earlier  and  cruder 
shapes  by  Erasmus  Darwin,  by  Lamarck,  or  by  Robert 
Chambers. 

Much  more,  then,  must  Darwinism  and  the  entire 
theory  of  organic  development  to  which  it  belongs  be 
carefully  discriminated,  as  a  part  or  factor,  from  evolu- 
tion at  large,  as  a  universal  and  all-embracing  cosmical 
system.     That  system  itself  has  gradually  emerged  as  a 


1^8  Charles  Darwin 

slow  growth  of  the  past  two  centuries,  a  progressive 
development  of  the  collective  scientific  and  philosophical 
mind  of  humanity,  not  due  in  its  totality  to  any  one 
single  commanding  thinker,  but  summing  itself  up  at 
last  in  our  own  time  more  fully  in  the  person  and 
teaching  of  Mr.  Herbert  Spencer  than  of  any  other 
solitary  mouthpiece.  Indeed,  intimately  as  we  all  now 
associate  the  name  of  Darwin  with  the  word  '  evolution,' 
that  term  itself  (whose  vogue  is  almost  entirely  due  to 
Mr.  Spencer's  influence)  was  one  but  rarely  found  upon 
Darwin's  own  lips,  and  but  rarely  written  by  his  own 
pen.  He  speaks  rather  of  development  and  of  natural 
selection  than  of  evolution  :  his  own  concern  was  more 
with  its  special  aspect  as  biological  modification  than 
with  its  general  aspect  as  cosmical  unfolding.  Let  us 
ask,  then,  from  this  wider  standpoint  of  a  great  and 
far-reaching  mental  revolution,  what  was  Charles 
Darwin's  exact  niche  in  the  evolutionary  movement  of 
the  two  last  centuries  ? 

Evolutionism,  as  now  commonly  understood,  may 
be  fairly  regarded  as  a  mode  of  envisaging  to  ourselves 
the  history  of  the  universe,  a  tendency  or  frame  of 
mind,  a  temperament,  one  might  almost  say,  or  habit 
of  thought  rather  than  a  definite  creed  or  body  of 
dogmas.  The  evolutionist  looks  out  upon  the  cosmos 
as  a  continuous  process  unfolding  itself  in  regular  order 
in  obedience  to  definite  natural  laws.  He  sees  in  it 
all,  not  a  warring  chaos  restrained  by  the  constant 
interference  from  without  of  a  wise  and  beneficent  ex- 
ternal power,  but  a  vast  aggregate  of  original  elements, 
perpetually  working  out  their  own  fresh  redistribution,  in 
accordance  with  their  own  inherent  energies.   He  regards 


Darwinism  and  Evolution  179 

the  cosmos  as  an  almost  infinite  collection  of  material 
atoms,  animated  by  an  almost  infinite  sum- total  of 
energy,  potential  or  kinetic. 

In  tlie  very  beginning,  so  far  as  the  mental  vision 
of  the  astronomer  can  dimly  pierce  with  hypothetical 
glance  the  abyss  of  ages,  the  matter  which  now  com- 
poses the  material  universe  seems  to  have  existed  in  a 
highly  diffuse  and  nebulous  condition.  The  gravitative 
force,  however,  with  which  every  atom  of  the  whole 
vast  mass  was  primarily  endowed,  caused  it  gradu- 
ally to  aggregate  around  certain  fixed  and  definite 
centres,  which  became  in  time  the  rallying-points  or 
nuclei  of  future  suns.  The  primitive  potential  energy 
of  separation  in  the  atoms  of  the  mass  was  changed 
into  actual  energy  of  motion  as  they  drew  closer  and 
closer  together  about  the  common  centre,  and  into 
molecular  energy  or  heat  as  they  clashed  with  one 
another  in  bodily  impact  around  the  hardening  cora. 
Thus  arose  stars  and  suns,  composed  of  fiery  atomic 
clouds  in  a  constant  state  of  progressive  concentration, 
ever  gathering-in  the  hem  of  their  outer  robes  on  the 
surface  of  the  solid  globe  within,  and  ever  radiating 
off  their  store  of  associated  energy  to  the  impalpable 
and  hypothetical  surrounding  ether.  This,  in  neces- 
sarily brief  and  shadowy  abstract,  is  the  nebular  theory 
of  Kant  and  Laplace,  as  amended  and  supplemented  by 
the  modem  doctrine  of  the  correlation  and  conservation 
of  energies. 

Applied  to  the  solar  system,  of  which  our  own 
planet  forms  a  component  member,  the  evolutionary 
doctrine  (in  its  elder  shape)  teaches  us  to  envisage  that 
minor  group  as  the  final  result  of  a  single  great  diffuse 


i8o  Charles  Darwin 

nebula,  which  once  spread  its  faint  and  cloud-like  mass 
with  inconceivable  tenuity,  at  least  as  far  from  its 
centre,  now  occupied  by  the  sun's  body,  as  the  furthest 
point  in  the  orbit  of  Neptune,  the  outermost  of  the  yet 
known  planets.  From  this  remote  and  immense  peri- 
phery it  has  gradually  gathered  itself  in,  growing 
denser  and  denser  all  the  time,  towards  its  common 
core,  and  has  left  behind,  at  irregular  intervals,  con- 
centric rings  or  belts  of  nebulous  matter,  which,  after 
rupturing  at  their  weakest  point,  have  hardened  and 
concentrated  round  their  own  centre  of  gravity  into 
Jupiter,  Saturn,  the  Earth,  or  Venus.  The  main  central 
body  of  all,  retreating  ever  within  as  it  dropped  in  its 
course  the  raw  material  of  the  planetary  masses,  has 
formed,  at  last,  the  sun,  the  great  ruler  and  luminary 
of  our  system.  Much  as  this  primitive  evolutionary 
concept  of  the  development  and  history  of  the  solar 
system  has  been  modified  and  altered  of  late  years  by 
recent  researches  into  the  nature  of  comets  and  meteors 
and  of  the  sun's  surface,  it  still  remains  for  all  practical 
purposes  of  popular  exposition  the  best  and  simplest 
mental  picture  of  the  general  type  of  astronomical 
evolution.  For  the  essential  point  which  it  impresses 
upon  the  mind  is  the  idea  of  the  planets  in  their  several 
orbits  and  with  their  attendant  satellites  as  due,  not  to 
external  design  and  special  creation,  in  the  exact 
order  in  which  we  now  see  them,  but  to  the  slow  and 
regular  working  out  of  preordained  physical  laws,  in 
accordance  with  which  they  have  each  naturally  assumed, 
by  pure  force  of  circumstances,  their  existing  size,  and 
weight,  and  orbit,  and  position. 

Geology  has   applied   a  similar  conception  to  the 


Darwinism  and  Evolution  i8i 

origin  and  becoming  of  the  earth's  material  and  external 
features  as  we  now  know  them.  Accepting  from  astro- 
nomy the  notion  of  our  planet's  primary  condition  as  a 
cooling  sphere  of  incandescent  matter,  it  goes  on  to 
show  how  the  two  great  envelopes,  atmospheric  and 
oceanic,  gaseous  and  liquid,  have  gradually  formed 
around  its  solid  core ;  how  the  hard  crust  of  the  central 
mass  has  been  wrinkled  and  corrugated  into  mountain 
chain  and  deep-cut  valley,  uplifted  here  into  elevated 
table-land  or  there  depressed  into  hollow  ocean  bed ; 
how  sediment  has  slowly  gathered  on  the  floor  of  the 
sea,  and  how  volcanic  energies  or  lateral  pressure  have 
subsequently  forced  up  the  resulting  deposits  into  Alpine 
peaks  and  massive  continents.  In  this  direction,  it  was 
Lyell  who  principally  introduced  into  science  the  uni- 
formitarian  or  evolutionary  principle,  who  substituted 
for  the  frequent  cataclysms  and  fresh  beginnings  of  the 
earlier  geologists  the  grand  conception  of  continuous 
action,  producing  from  comparatively  infinitesimal  but 
cumulative  causes  effects  which  at  last  attain  by  accretion 
the  most  colossal  proportions. 

Here  biology  next  steps  in,  with  its  splendid  ex- 
planation of  organic  life,  as  due  essentially  to  the 
secondary  action  of  radiated  solar  energy  on  the  outer 
crust  of  such  a  cooling  and  evolving  planet.  Falling 
on  the  cells  of  the  simplest  green  plants,  the  potent 
sunlight  dissociates  the  carbon  from  the  oxygen  in  the 
carbonic  acid  floating  in  the  atmosphere,  and  builds  it 
up  with  the  hydrogen  of  water  in  the  tissues  of  the 
organism  into  starches  and  other  organic  products, 
which  differ  from  the  inert  substances  around  them, 
mainly  by  the  possession  of  locked-up  solar  energy.    On 


1 82  Charles  Darwin 

the  energy-yielding  food-stuffs  thus  stored  up  the 
animal  in  turn  feeds  and  battens,  reducing  what  was 
before  potential  into  actual  motion,  just  as  the  steam- 
engine  reduces  the  latent  solar  energy  of  coal  into 
visible  heat  and  visible  movement  in  its  furnace  and  its 
machinery.  How  the  first  organism  came  to  exist 
biology  has  not  yet  been  able  fully  to  explain  for  us  ;  but 
aided  by  chemical  science  it  has  been  able  to  show  us 
in  part  how  some  of  the  simpler  organic  bodies  may 
have  been  originally  built  up,  and  it  does  not  despair  of 
showing  us  in  the  end  how  the  earliest  organism  may 
actually  have  been  produced  from  the  prime  elements 
of  oxygen,  hydrogen,  nitrogen,  and  carbon.  Into  this 
most  fundamental  of  biological  problems,  however, 
Darwin  himself,  with  his  constitutional  caution  and  dread 
of  speculative  theorising,  was  not  careful  or  curious  to 
enter.  Even  upon  the  far  less  abstruse  and  hypothetical 
question,  whether  all  life  took  its  prime  origin  from  a 
single  starting-point  or  from  several  distinct  and  separate 
tribal  ancestors,  he  hardly  cared  so  much  as  to  hazard 
a  passing  speculation.  With  splendid  self-restraint  he 
confined  his  attention  almost  entirely  to  the  more 
manageable  and  practical  problem  of  the  origin  of 
species  by  natural  selection,  which  lay  then  and  there 
open  for  solution  before  him.  Taking  for  granted  the 
existence  of  the  original  organism  or  group  of  organisms, 
the  fact  of  reproduction,  and  the  tendency  of  such 
reproduction  to  beget  increase  in  a  geometrical  ratio, 
he  deduced  from  these  elementary  given  factors  the 
necessary  corollary  of  survival  of  the  fittest,  with  all  its 
marvellous  and  far-reaching  implications  of  adaptation 
to  the  environment  and  specific  distinctionsv     By  doing 


Darwinism  and  Evolution  183 

so,  he  rendered  conceivable  the  mechanism  of  evolution 
in  the  organic  world,  thus  bringing  another  great  aspect 
of  external  nature  within  the  range  of  the  developmental 
as  opposed  to  the  miraculous  philosophy  of  the  cosmos. 

Psychology,  once  more,  in  the  hands  of  Herbert 
Spencer  and  his  followers,  not  wholly  unaided  by 
Darwin  himself,  has  extended  the  self-same  evolu- 
tionary treatment  to  the  involved  and  elusive  pheno- 
mena of  mind,  and  has  shown  how  from  the  simplest 
unorganised  elements  of  feeling,  the  various  mental 
powers  and  faculties  as  we  now  know  them,  both  on 
the  intellectual  and  on  the  emotional  side,  have  been 
slowly  built  up  in  the  long  and  ever- varying  inter- 
action between  the  sentient  organism  and  the  natural 
environment.  It  has  traced  the  first  faint  inception  of 
a  nervous  system  as  a  mere  customary  channel  of  com- 
munication between  part  and  part ;  the  gradual  growth 
of  fibre  and  ganglion  ;  the  vague  beginnings  of  external 
sense-organ  and  internal  brain  ;  the  final  perfection  of 
eye  and  ear,  of  sight  and  hearing,  of  pleasure  and  pain, 
of  intellect  and  volition.  It  has  thus  done  for  the  sub- 
jective or  mental  half  of  our  complex  nature  what 
biology,  as  conceived  by  Darwin,  has  done  for  the 
physical  or  purely  organic  half ;  it  has  traced  the  origin 
and  development  of  mind,  without  a  single  break,  from 
its  first  faint  and  half-unconscious  manifestation  in  the 
polyp  or  the  jelly-fish  to  its  final  grand  and  varied 
outcome  in  the  soul  of  the  poet  or  the  intellect  of  the 
philosopher. 

Finally,  sociology  has  applied  the  evolutionary 
method  to  the  origin  and  rise  of  human  societies,  with 
their  languages,  customs,  arts,  and  institutions,  their 


184  Charles  Darwin 

governmental  organisation  and  their  ecclesiastical  polity. 
Taking  from  biology  the  evolving  savage,  viewed  as  a 
developed  and  highly  gifted  product  of  the  anthropoid 
stock,  it  has  shown  by  what  stages  and  through  what 
causes  he  has  slowly  aggregated  into  tribes  and  nations ; 
has  built  up  his  communal,  polygamic,  or  monogamic 
family;  has  learnt  the  use  of  fire,  of  implements,  of 
pottery,  of  metals ;  has  developed  the  whole  resources 
of  oral  speech  and  significant  gesture ;  has  invented 
writing,  pictorial  or  alphabetic ;  has  grown  up  to  science, 
to  philosophy,  to  morals,  and  to  religion.  The  chief 
honours  of  this  particular  line  of  enquiry,  the  latest  and 
youngest  of  all  to  receive  the  impact  of  the  evolutionary 
impulse,  belong  mainly  to  Tylor,  Lubbock,  and  Spencer 
in  England,  and  to  Haeckel,  De  Mortillet,  and  Wagner 
on  the  continent. 

In  the  sublime  conception  of  the  external  universe 
and  its  present  workings  which  we  thus  owe  to  the  inde- 
pendent efforts  of  so  many  great  progressive  thinkers, 
and  which  has  here  been  briefly  and  inadequately 
sketched  out,  Darwin's  work  in  life  falls  naturally  into 
its  own  place  as  the  principal  contribution  to  the  evo- 
lutionary movement  in  the  special  biological  depart- 
ment of  thought.  Within  the  more  limited  range  of 
that  department  itself,"  the  evolutionary  impulse  did 
not  owe  its  origin  to  Charles  Darwin  personally ;  it  took 
its  rise  with  Erasmus  Darwin,  Buffon,  and  Lamarck, 
and  it  derived  from  our  great  modern  English  naturalist 
its  final  explanation  and  definitive  pi'oof  alone.  But 
just  as  the  evolutionary  movement  in  astronomy  and 
cosmical  thought  is  rightly  associated  in  all  our  minds 
with  the  mighty  theories  of  Kant,  Laplace,  and  Her- 


Darwinism  and  Evolution  185 

schel ;  just  as  tlie  evolutionary  movement  in  geology  is 
rightly  associated  with  the  far  lesser  yet  brilliant  and 
effective  personality  of  Lyell ;  just  as  the  evolutionary 
movement  in  the  derivative  sciences  is  rightly  associated 
with  so  many  great  still  living  thinkers;  so  the  evo- 
lutionary movement  in  biology  in  particular  rightly 
sums  itself  up  in  the  honoured  name  of  Charles  Darwin. 
For  what  others  suspected,  he  was  the  first  to  prove; 
where  others  speculated,  he  was  the  first  to  observe,  to 
experiment,  to  demonstrate,  and  to  convince. 

It  should  be  noted,  too,  that  while  to  us  who  come 
after,  the  great  complex  evolutionary  movement  of  the 
two  last  centuries  justly  reveals  itself  as  one  and  in- 
divisible, a  single  grand  cosmical  drama,  having  many 
acts  and  many  scenes,  but  all  alike  inspired  by  one 
informing  and  pervading  unity,  yet  to  those  whose  half 
unconscious  co-operation  slowly  built  it  up  by  episodes, 
piecemeal,  each  act  and  each  scene  unrolled  itself 
separately  as  an  end  in  itself,  to  be  then  and  there 
attained  and  proved,  quite  apart  from  the  conception  of 
its  analytic  value  as  a  part  in  a  great  harmonious 
natural  poem  of  the  constitution  of  things.  Though 
evolution  appears  to  us  now  as  a  single  grand  continu- 
ous process,  a  phase  of  the  universe  dependent  upon  a 
preponderating  aggregation  of  matter  and  dissipation  of 
energy,  yet  to  Kant  and  Laplace  it  was  the  astronomical 
aspect  alone  that  proved  attractive,  to  Darwin  it  was 
the  biological  aspect  alone,  and  to  many  of  the  modern 
workers  in  the  minor  fields  it  is  the  human  and  socio- 
logical aspect  that  almost  monopolises  the  whole  wide 
mental  horizon.  No  greater  proof  can  be  given  of  the 
subjective  distinctness  of  parts  in  what  was  objectively 
VI 


1 86  Charles  Darwin 

and  fundamentally  a  single  broad  psycliological  revolu- 
tion of  the  human  mind,  than  the  fact  that  Lyell  him- 
self, who  more  than  any  one  man  had  introduced  the 
evolutionary  conception  into  the  treatment  of  geology, 
should  have  stood  out  so  long  and  fought  so  blindly 
against  the  evolutionary  conception  in  the  organic 
world.  Indeed,  it  was  not  until  the  various  scattered 
and  many-coloured  strands  of  evolutionary  thought  had 
been  gathered  together  and  woven  into  one  by  the  vast 
catholic  and  synthetic  intelligence  of  Herbert  Spencer 
that  the  idea  of  evolution  as  a  whole,  as  a  single  con- 
tinuous cosmical  process,  began  to  be  apprehended  and 
gradually  assimilated  by  the  picked  intelligences  of  the 
several  distinct  scientific  departments. 

Observe  also  that  the  evolutionary  method  has 
invaded  each  of  the  concrete  sciences  in  the  exact  order 
of  their  natural  place  in  the  hierarchy  of  knowledge. 
It  had  been  applied  to  astronomy  by  Kant  and  Laplace 
before  it  was  applied  to  geology  by  Lyell ;  it  had  been 
applied  to  geology  by  Lyell  before  it  was  applied  to 
biology  by  Darwin ;  it  had  been  applied  to  biology  (in 
part,  at  least)  by  Lamarck  and  the  Darwins  before  it  was 
applied  to  psychology  by  Spencer;  and  it  is  only  at 
the  very  end  of  all  that  it  has  been  applied  to  sociology 
and  the  allied  branches  of  thought  by  a  hundred  different 
earnest  workers  in  contemporary  Europe.  Each  stage 
helped  on  the  next ;  each  was  dependent  only  on  those 
that  went  naturally  before  it,  and  aided  in  turn  the 
subsequent  development  of  those  that  naturally  came 
after  it. 

Nevertheless,  the  popular  instinct  which  regards 
Darwinism  and  evolution  as  practically  synonymous  is 


Darwinism  and  Evolution  187 

to  a  large  extent  justified  by  tlie  actual  facts  of  tlie 
psychological  upheaval.  Darwin's  work  forms  on  the 
whole  the  central  keystone  of  the  evolutionary  system, 
and  deserves  the  honour  which  has  been  thrust  upon  it 
of  supporting  by  its  own  mass  the  entire  superstructure 
of  the  development  theory. 

For,  in  the  first  place,  Darwin  had  to  deal  with  the 
science  of  life,  the  science  where  the  opposition  to 
evolutionism  was  sure  to  be  strongest,  and  where  the 
forces  and  tendencies  in  favour  of  obscurantism  were 
sure  to  gather  in  fullest  force.  Every  other  great 
onward  step  in  our  knowledge  of  our  own  relation  to 
the  universe  of  which  we  form  a  part  had  been  com- 
pelled indeed  to  run  the  gauntlet,  in  its  own  time,  of 
ecclesiastical  censure  and  of  popular  dislike.  Those 
inveterate  prejudices  of  human  ignorance  which  sedu- 
lously hide  their  genuine  shape  under  the  guise  of 
dogma  masquerading  as  religion,  had  long  since  brought 
to  bear  their  baneful  resources  upon  the  discoveries  of 
Copernicus  and  the  theories  of  Galileo,  as  blind,  mislead- 
ing, and  diabolical  lights,  opposed  to  the  sure  and 
certain  warranty  of  Holy  Scripture.  Newton,  again, 
had  in  due  time  been  blamed  in  that  he  boldly  sub- 
stituted (as  his  critics  declared)  the  bald  and  barren 
formula  of  gravitation  for  the  personal  superinten- 
dence of  a  divine  Providence.  Laplace  had  been 
accused  of  dethroning  the  deity  from  the  centre  and 
governance  of  his  celestial  system.  Around  the  early 
geologists  the  battle  of  the  six  days  of  creation 
had  raged  fiercely  for  nearly  half  a  century.  But 
all  these  varying  modes  of  thought,  though  deemed 
heretical  enough  in  their  own  day,  had  touched,  as  it 


1 88  Charles  Darwin 

were,  but  the  minor  ramparts  and  unimportant  out- 
works of  tlie  great  obscurantist  dogmatic  strongholds  : 
Darwinism,  by  openly  attacking  the  inmost  problems  of 
life  and  mind,  had  brought  to  bear  its  powerful  artillery 
upon  the  very  keep  and  highest  tower  of  the  fortress 
itself.  The  belief  that  the  various  stars,  planets,  and 
satellites  had  or  had  not  been  wisely  created  in  their 
existing  positions,  and  with  their  present  orbits,  move- 
ments, and  relations  accurately  fore-measured,  did  not 
fundamentally  affect,  for  good  or  evil,  the  cherished 
dogmas  of  the  ordinary  multitude.  But  the  analogous 
belief  in  the  distinct  and  separate  creation  of  plants  and 
animals,  and  more  especially  of  the  human  species,  was 
far  more  closely  and  intimately  bound  up  with  all  the 
current  religious  conceptions.  It  was  at  first  supposed, 
not  perhaps  without  some  practical  wisdom,  that  to  upset 
the  primitive  faith  in  the  separate  creation  of  living 
beings  was  to  loosen  and  imperil  the  very  foundations  of 
common  morality  and  revealed  religion.  The  '  argimient 
from  design'  had  been  immemorially  regarded  as  the 
principal  buttress  of  orthodox  thought.  Theologians  had 
unwisely  staked  their  all  upon  the  teleological  dogma, 
and  could  ill  afford  to  retire  without  a  blow  from  that 
tenaciously  defended  bastion  of  their  main  position. 
Hence  the  evolutionary  concept  had  its  hardest  fight  to 
wage  over  the  biological  field ;  and  when  that  field  was 
once  fairly  won,  it  had  little  more  to  fear  from  banded 
preconceptions  and  established  prejudices  in  any  other 
portion  of  the  wide  territory  it  claimed  for  its  own. 

In  the  second  place,  biological  evolution,  firmly 
established  by  Darwin  on  a  safe,  certain,  and  unim- 
peachable basis,  led  naturally  and  almost  inevitably  to 


Darwinism  and  Evolution  189 

all  ttie  other  innumerable  applications  of  the  evolution- 
ary method,  in  the  domains  of  psychology,  sociology, 
philology,  political  thought,  and  ethical  science.  Hence 
the  immediate  and  visible  results  of  its  promulgation 
have  been  far  more  striking,  noticeable,  and  evident  than 
those  which  followed  the  establishment  of  the  evolution- 
ary conception  in  the  astronomical  and  geological 
departments.  It  was  possible  to  accept  cosmical  evolu- 
tion and  solar  evolution  and  planetary  evolution,  without 
at  the  same  time  accepting  evolution  in  the  restricted 
field  of  life  and  mind.  But  it  was  impossible  to  accept 
evolution  in  biology  without  at  the  same  time  extending 
its  application  to  psychology,  to  the  social  organism,  to 
language,  to  ethics,  to  all  the  thousand  and  one  varied  in- 
terests of  human  life  and  human  development.  Now,  most 
people  are  little  moved  by  speculations  and  hypotheses 
as  to  the  origin  of  the  milky  way  or  the  belt  of  Orion ; 
they  care  very  slightly  for  Jupiter's  moons  or  Saturn's 
rings ;  they  are  stolidly  incurious  as  to  the  development 
of  the  earth's  crust,  or  the  precise  date  of  the  cretaceous 
epoch ;  but  they  understand  and  begin  to  be  touched 
the  moment  you  come  to  the  practical  questions  of  man's 
origin,  nature,  and  history.  Darwinism  compelled  their 
attention  by  its  immediate  connection  with  their  own 
race ;  and  the  proof  of  this  truth  is  amply  shown  by  the 
mere  fact  that  out  of  all  the  immense  variety  of  Charles 
Darwin's  theories  and  ideas,  the  solitary  one  which 
alone  has  succeeded  in  attaching  to  itself  the  public 
interest  and  public  ridicule  is  the  theory  of  man's 
ultimate  descent  from  a  monkey-like  ancestor.  Popu- 
lar instinct,  here  as  elsewhere  profoundly  true  at  core 
in  the    midst  of   all   its   superficial    foolishness,   has 


190  Charles  Darwin 

rightly  hit  upon  the  central  element  in  the  Darwinian 
conception  which  more  than  any  other  has  caused  its 
fruitful  and  wonderful  expansion  through  every  fertile 
field  of  human  enquiry. 

In  short,  it  was  Darwin's  task  in  life  to  draw  down 
evolution  from  heaven  to  earth,  and  to  bring  within  the 
scope  of  its  luminous  method  all  that  is  most  interesting 
to  the  uninstructed  and  unsophisticated  heart  of  the 
natural  man. 

The  application  of  the  evolutionary  principle  to  the 
world  of  life,  human  or  animal,  thus  presents  itself  as 
the  chief  philosophic  and  scientific  achievement  of  the 
nineteenth  century.  Throughout  the  whole  middle 
decades  of  the  present  age,  the  human  mind  in  all  its 
highest  embodiments  was  eagerly  searching,  groping,  and 
enquiring  after  a  naturalistic  explanation  of  the  origin 
and  progress  of  organic  life.  In  the  vast  scheme  for 
the  System  of  Synthetic  Philosophy  which  Herbert 
Spencer  set  forth  as  an  anticipatory  synopsis  of  his 
projected  work,  the  philosopher  of  development  leapt  at 
once  from  the  First  Principles  of  evolution  as  a  whole  to 
the  Principles  of  Biology,  Psychology,  and  Sociology, 
omitting  all  reference  to  the  application  of  evolution  to 
the  vast  field  of  inorganic  nature ;  and  he  did  so  on  the 
distinctly  stated  ground  that  its  application  to  organic 
nature  was  then  and  there  more  important  and  interest- 
ing. That  suggestive  expression  of  belief  aptly  sums 
up  the  general  attitude  of  scientific  and  philosophic 
minds  at  the  precise  moment  of  the  advent  of  Darwinism. 
Kant  and  Laplace  and  Lyell  had  already  applied  the 
evolutionary  method  to  suns  and  systems,  to  planets  and 
continents  j    what  was   needed    next  was  that  some 


Darwinism  and  Evolution  191 

deeply  learned  and  universally  equipped  biological  leader 
should  help  the  lame  evolutionism  of  Lamarck  over  the 
organic  stile,  and  leave  it  free  to  roam  the  boundless 
fields  of  what  Mr.  Spencer  has  sometimes  well  described 
as  the  super-organic  sciences.  For  that  office,  Darwin 
at  the  exact  moment  presented  himself;  and  his  victory 
and  its  results  rightly  entitle  him  to  the  popular  regard 
as  the  founder  of  all  that  most  men  mean  when  they 
speak  together  in  everyday  conversation  of  the  doctrine 
of  evolution. 

On  the  other  hand,  the  total  esoteric  philosophic 
conception  of  evolution  as  a  cosmical  process,  one  and 
continuous  from  nebula  to  man,  from  star  to  soul,  from 
atom  to  society,  we  owe  rather  to  the  other  great 
prophet  of  the  evolutionary  creed,  Herbert  Spencer, 
whose  name  will  ever  be  equally  remembered  side  by 
side  with  his  mighty  peer's,  in  a  place  of  high  collateral 
glory.  It  is  he  who  has  given  us  the  general  definition 
of  evolution  as  a  progress  from  an  indefinite,  incoherent 
homogeneity  to  a  definite  coherent  heterogeneity, 
accompanying  an  integration  of  matter  and  dissipation 
of  motion,  or,  as  we  should  now  perhaps  more  correctly 
say,  of  energy.  In  the  establishment  of  the  various 
lines  of  thought  which  merge  at  last  in  that  magnificent 
cosmical  law,  it  was  Darwin's  special  task  to  bring  the 
phenomena  of  organic  life  well  within  the  clear  ken  of 
known  and  invariable  natural  processes. 


192  Charles  Darwin 


CHAPTER  XII. 

THE    NET    RESULT. 

And  now  let  ns  ask  ourselves,  in  all  sincerity,  what  was 
the  final  outcome  and  net  result  of  Darwin's  great  and 
useful  life  ? 

If  Charles  Darwin  had  never  existed  at  all,  there 
would  still  have  been  a  considerable  and  expansive 
evolutionary  movement  both  in  biology  and  in  its  sister 
sciences  throughout  the  latter  half  of  the  present 
century.  The  harvest  indeed  was  ready,  and  the 
labourers,  though  few,  were  full  of  vigour.  Suppose 
for  a  moment  that  that  earnest  and  single-hearted  Dar- 
winian genius  had  been  cut  off  by  some  untimely  disease 
of  childhood  at  five  years  old,  all  other  conditions 
remaining  as  they  were,  we  should  even  so  have  had  in 
our  midst  to-day,  a  small  philosophical  and  influential 
band  of  evolutionary  workers.  Spencer  would  none 
the  less  have  given  us  his  *  First  Principles '  and  the 
major  part  of  his  'Principles  of  Biology,'  with  com- 
paratively little  alteration  or  omission.  "Wallace  would 
none  the  less  have  promulgated  his  inchoate  theory  of 
natural  selection,  and  rallied  round  his  primordial  con- 
ception the  very  best  and  deepest  minds  of  the  biological 
fraction.     Geology  would  have  enforced  the  continuity 


The  Net  Result  193 

of  types ;  Cope  and  Marsh  would  have  unearthed  for 
our  edification  the  ancestral  forms  of  the  evolving  horse 
and  the  toothed  birds  of  the  Western  American  deposits. 
The  Solenhofen  lithographic  slates  would  still  have 
yielded  us  the  half-reptilian,  half-avian  Archaeopteryx ; 
the  tertiary  deposits  would  still  have  presented  us  with 
a  long  suite  of  gradually  specialised  and  modified 
mammalian  forms.  The  Siberian  meadows  would  have 
sent  us  that  intermediate  creature  which  Prjevalsky  re- 
cognises as  the  half-way  house  between  the  horses  and 
the  donkeys  ;  the  rivers  of  Queensland  would  have  dis- 
closed to  our  view  that  strange  lung-bearing  and  gill- 
breathing  barramunda,  in  which  Giinther  discerns  the 
missing  link  between  the  ganoid  fishes  on  the  one  hand, 
and  the  mudfish  and  salamandroid  amphibians  on  the 
other.  From  data  such  as  these,  biologists  and  paleon- 
tologists of  the  calibre  of  Huxley,  Gaudry,  Geikie, 
Riitimeyer,  and  Busk,  would  necessarily  have  derived, 
by  the  aid  of  Wallace's  pregnant  principle,  conclusions 
not  so  very  far  remote  from  Darwin's  own.  Heer  and 
Saporta  would  have  drawn  somewhat  similar  inferences 
from  the  fossil  flora  of  Switzerland  and  of  Greenland ; 
Hooker  and  De  Candolle  would  have  read  pretty  much 
the  self-same  lessons  in  the  scattered  ferns  and  scanty 
palm-trees  of  oceanic  islands.  Kowalevsky  would  have 
seen  in  the  ascidian  larva  a  common  prototype  of  the 
vertebrate  series  ;  the  followers  of  Von  Baer  would  have 
popularised  the  embryological  conception  of  the  single 
origin  of  animal  life.  The  researches  of  Boucher  de 
Perthes,  of  Lyell,  of  Evans,  of  Boyd  Dawkins,  of 
Keller,  and  of  Christy  and  Lartet,  would  have  unrolled 
before  our  eyes,  under  any  circumstances,  the  strange 


194  Charles  Darwin 

story  of  prehistoric  man.  On  tlie  facts  so  gained, 
Lubbock  and  Tylor,  Schaafhausen  and  Biichner,  would 
have  built  up  their  various  consistent  theories  of  human 
development  and  human  culture.  In  short,  even  with- 
out Charles  Darwin,  the  nineteenth  century  would  not 
have  stood  still ;  it  would  have  followed  in  the  wake  of 
Buffon  and  Diderot,  of  Lamarck  and  Laplace,  of  St. 
Hilaire  and  Goethe,  of  Kant  and  Herschel,  of  Hutton 
and  Lyell,  of  Malthus  and  of  Spencer.  The  great  world 
never  rolls  down  the  abysses  of  time  obedient  to  the 
nod  of  one  single  overruling  Titanic  intellect.  '  If 
the  doctrine  of  evolution  had  not  existed,'  says  Huxley, 
*  palseontologists  must  have  invented  it.' 

But  Charles  Darwin  acted,  nevertheless,  the  part  of 
an  immense  and  powerful  accelerating  energy.  The 
impetus  which  he  gave  gained  us  at  least  fifty  years  of 
progi'ess;  it  sent  us  at  a  bound  from  Copernicus  to 
Newton ;  so  far  as  ordinary  minds  were  concerned,  in- 
deed, it  transcended  at  a  single  leap  the  whole  interval 
from  Ptolemy  to  Herschel.  The  comparison  is  far  from 
being  a  mere  rhetorical  one.  A  close  analogy  really  exists 
between  the  two  cases.  Before  Copernicus,  the  earth 
stood  fixed  and  immovable  in  the  centre  of  the  universe, 
with  obsequious  suns,  and  planets,  and  satellites  dancing 
attendance  in  cycle  and  epicycle  around  the  solid  mass, 
to  which  by  day  and  night  they  continually  ministered. 
The  great  astronomical  revolution  begun  by  Copernicus, 
Galileo,  and  Kepler,  and  completed  by  Newton,  Laplace, 
and  Herschel,  reduced  the  earth  to  its  true  position  as 
a  petty  planet,  revolving  feebly  among  its  bigger  brethren 
round  a  petty  sun,  in  some  lost  comer  of  a  vast,  majestic, 
and  almost  illimitable  galaxy.     Even  so,  before  Darwin, 


The  Net  Result  195 

man  stood  in  his  own  esteem  the  fixed  point  of  an 
anthropocentric  universe,  divinely  born  and  divinely 
instructed,  with  all  the  beasts  of  the  field,  and  the  fowls 
of  the  air,  and  the  fruits  of  the  earth  specially  created 
with  a  definite  purpose  in  subservience  to  his  lordly 
wants  and  interests.  The  great  biological  revolution, 
which  rightly  almost  sums  itself  up  in  the  name  of 
Darwin,  reduced  man  at  once  to  his  true  position  as  the 
last  product  of  kinetic  solar  energy,  working  upon  the 
peculiar  chemical  elements  of  an  evolving  planet.  It 
showed  that  every  part  of  every  plant  and  every  animal 
existed  primarily  for  the  sake  of  that  plant  or  animal 
alone ;  it  unseated  man  from  his  imaginary  throne  in 
the  centre  of  the  cosmos,  teaching  him  at  once  a  lesson 
of  humility  and  a  lesson  of  aspiration — pointing  out  to 
him  how  low  was  the  origin  from  which,  in  very  truth, 
he  first  sprang,  and  suggesting  to  him,  at  the  same 
time,  how  high  was  the  grand  and  glorious  destiny  to 
which  by  his  own  strenuous  and  ardent  efibrts  he  might 
yet  perchance  some  day  attain. 

That  result,  inevitable  perhaps  in  the  long  run,  from 
the  slow  unfolding  of  human  intelligence,  was  immensely 
hastened  in  our  own  time  by  the  peculiar  idiosyncrasy 
and  lofty  personality  of  Charles  Darwin.  Without  him 
we  should  have  had,  not  only  evolutionism,  but  also,  as 
Wallace's  discovery  testifies,  natural  selection  itself  into 
the  bargain.  But  we  should  never  have  had  the  '  Origin 
of  Species.'  We  should  never  have  had  that  vast  and 
enthusiastic  consensus  of  scientific  opinion  through  an 
all  but  unanimous  thinking  world,  which  has  forced  an 
immediate  acceptance  of  evolutionary  ideas  down  the 
unwilling  throats   of   half  unthinking   Europe.     The 


196  Charles  Darwin 

prodigious  mass  of  Darwin's  facts,  the  cautious  working 
of  Darwin's  intellect,  the  immense  weight  of  Darwin's 
reputation,  the  crushing  force  of  Darwin's  masterly  in- 
ductive method,  bore  down  before  them  all  opposition  in 
the  inner  circle  of  biologists,  and  secured  the  triumph 
of  the  evolutionary  system  even  in  the  very  strongholds 
of  ignorance  and  obscurantism.  Without  Darwin,  a 
small  group  of  philosophic  thinkers  would  still  be  striv- 
ing to  impress  upon  an  incredulous  and  somewhat  con- 
temptuous world  the  central  truths  of  the  evolutionary 
doctrine.  The  opposition  of  the  elders,  long  headed  even 
in  the  society  we  actually  know  by  a  few  stern  scientific 
recalcitrants,  like  Owen  and  Agassiz,  Pictet  and  Dawson, 
Virchow  and  Mivart,  would  have  fought  desperately  in 
the  last  trench  for  the  final  figment  of  the  fixity  of 
species.  What  is  now  the  general  creed,  more  or  less 
loosely  held  and  imperfectly  understood,  of  hundreds  and 
thousands  among  the  intelligent  mass,  would,  under  such 
circumstances,  be  even  yet  the  mere  party-shibboleth  of 
an  esoteric  few,  struggling  hard  against  the  bare  force 
of  overwhelming  numbers  to  ensui*e  not  only  recogni- 
tion but  a  fair  hearing  for  the  first  principles  of  the 
development  theory.  It  is  to  Darwin,  and  to  Darwin 
almost  alone,  that  we  owe  the  present  comparatively 
wide  acceptance  of  the  all-embracing  doctrine  of  evolu- 
tion. 

No  other  man  did  so  much  or  could  have  done  so 
much  to  ensure  its  triimiph.  He  began  early  in  life  to 
collect  and  arrange  a  vast  encyclopaedia  of  facts,  all 
finally  focussed  with  supreme  skill  upon  the  great  prin- 
ciple he  so  clearly  perceived,  and  so  lucidly  expounded. 
He  brought  to  bear  upon  the  question  an  amount  of 


The  Net  Result  197 

personal  observation,  of  minute  experiment,  of  world- 
wide book-knowledge,  of  universal  scientific  ability,  such 
as  never  perhaps  was  lavished  by  any  other  man  upon 
any  other  department  of  study.  His  conspicuous  and 
beautiful  love  of  truth,  his  unflinching  candour,  his 
transparent  fearlessness  and  honesty  of  purpose,  his 
child-like  simplicity,  his  modesty  of  demeanour,  his 
charming  manner,  his  affectionate  disposition,  his  kind- 
liness to  friends,  his  courtesy  to  opponents,  his  gentleness 
to  harsh  and  often  bitter  assailants,  kindled  in  the  minds 
of  men  of  science  everywhere  throughout  the  world  a 
contagious  enthusiasm,  only  equalled  perhaps  among  the 
disciples  of  Socrates  and  the  great  teachers  of  the 
revival  of  learning.  His  name  became  a  rallying-point 
for  the  childi-en  of  light  in  every  country ;  and  what 
philosophers  and  speculators  might  have  taken  a  century 
or  two  more  to  establish  in  embryo  was  firmly  grounded, 
never  to  be  overthrown,  by  the  vast  accumulations  of 
fact  and  argument  in  the  '  Origin  of  Species,'  and  its 
companion  volumes. 

The  end  of  that  great  Darwinian  revolution  the 
world  has  not  yet  seen  :  in  a  sense,  indeed,  it  will  never 
see  it.  For  the  general  acceptance  of  Darwin's  theory, 
which  we  may  Avatch  progressing  around  us  every 
minute  to-day,  implies  a  complete  louleversement  of 
anthropocentric  ideas,  a  total  change  in  our  human  con- 
ception of  our  own  relations  to  the  world  and  the 
universe,  which  must  work  out  for  ever  increasingly 
wide-reaching  and  complex  effects  in  all  our  dealings 
with  one  another  and  with  the  environment  at  large. 
There  is  no  department  of  human  thought  or  human 
action  which  evolutionism  leaves  exactly  where  it  stood 
18 


198  Charles  Darwin 

before  the  advent  of  the  Darwinian  conception.  In 
nothing  is  this  fact  more  conspicuously  seen  than  in  the 
immediate  obsolescence  (if  one  may  so  speak)  of  all  the 
statical  pre-Darwinian  philosophies  which  ignored  de- 
velopment, as  soon  as  ever  the  new  progressive  evolu- 
tionary theories  had  fairly  burst  upon  an  astonished 
world.  Dogmatic  Comte  was  left  forthwith  to  his  little 
band  of  devoted  adherents ;  shadowy  Hegel  was  rele- 
gated with  a  bow  to  the  cool  shades  of  the  common- 
rooms  of  Oxford ;  Buckle  was  exploded  like  an  inflated 
wind-bag;  even  Mill  himself — magnum  et  venerabile 
nomen — with  all  his  mighty  steam-hammer  force  of 
logical  directness,  was  felt  instinctively  to  be  lacking  in 
full  appreciation  of  the  dynamic  and  kinetic  element  in 
universal  nature.  Spencer  and  Hartmann,  Haeckel 
and  Clifford,  had  the  field  to  themselves  for  the  establish- 
ment of  their  essentially  evolutionary  systems.  Great 
thinkers  of  the  elder  generation,  like  Bain  and  Lye  11, 
felt  bound  to  remodel  their  earlier  conceptions  by  the 
light  of  the  new  Darwinian  hypotheses.  Those  who 
failed  by  congenital  constitution  to  do  so,  like  Carlyle  and 
Carpenter,  were,  philosophically  speaking,  left  hopelessly 
behind  and  utterly  extinguished.  Those  who  only  half 
succeeded  in  thus  reading  themselves  into  the  new 
ideas,  like  Lewes  and  Max  Miiller,  lost  ground  imme- 
diately before  the  eager  onslaught  of  their  younger 
competitors.  'The  world  is  to  the  young,'  says  the 
eastern  proverb ;  and  in  a  world  peopled  throughout  in 
the  high  places  of  thought  by  men  almost  without 
exception  evolutionists,  there  was  little  or  no  place  for 
the  timid  group  of  stranded  Girondins,  who  still  stood 
aloof  in  sullen  antique  scientific  orthodoxy  from  what 


The  Net  Result  199 

seemed  to  them  the  carmagnoles  and  orgies  of  a  bio- 
logical Thermidor. 

At  the  same  time,  it  must  be  steadUy  remembered 
that  there  are  many  naturalists  at  the  present  day, 
especially  among  those  of  the  lower  order  of  intelli- 
gence, who,  while  accepting  evolutionism  in  a  general 
way,  and  therefore  always  describing  themselves  as 
Darwinians,  do  not  believe  and  often  cannot  even 
understand  the  distinctive  Darwinian  addition  to  the 
evolutionary  doctrine — namely,  the  principle  of  natural 
selection.  Such  hazy  and  indistinct  thinkers  as  these 
are  still  really  at  the  prior  stage  of  Lamarckian  evolu- 
tionism. It  is  probable  that  in  the  future,  while  a 
formal  acceptance  of  Darwinism  becomes  general,  the 
special  theory  of  natural  selection  will  be  thoroughly 
understood  and  assimilated  only  by  the  more  abstract 
and  philosophical  minds.  Our  children  will  be  taught 
as  a  matter  of  course  the  doctrine  of  development  or  of 
descent  with  modification ;  but  the  rationale  of  that 
descent  will  still  remain  in  all  likelihood  always  beyond 
the  grasp  of  most  of  them  :  just  as  thousands  accept  on 
authority  the  Copernican  astronomy,  who  would  never 
even  be  capable  of  comprehending  the  simplest  proofs 
of  the  earth's  annual  movement  round  the  sun.  Thus 
the  name  of  Darwin  will  often  no  doubt  be  tacked  on 
to  what  are  in  reality  the  principles  of  Lamarck. 

Every  day,  however,  in  spite  of  such  half-ignorant 
adherents,  the  effects  of  true  Darwinism  are  widening 
and  deepening.  One  group  of  earnest  workers  is  using 
it  now  as  a  guide  to  physiological,  embryological,  and 
anatomical  researches.  Another  is  employing  it  with 
zeal  and  skill  in  the  field  of  classificatory  and  physio- 


200  Charles  Darwin 

logical  botany.  Yet  others  are  working  out  its  psycho- 
logical implications,  enquiring  into  instinct  and  animal 
intelligence,  and  solving  by  its  aid  abstruse  problems 
of  the  human  mind  and  the  human  emotions.  One 
philosopher  has  brought  it  to  bear  on  questions  of 
ethics,  another  on  questions  of  social  and  political 
economy.  Its  principles  have  been  applied  in  one  place 
to  aesthetics,  in  another  place  to  logic,  in  a  third  place 
to  the  origin  and  growth  of  religion.  The  study  of 
language  has  derived  new  lights  from  the  great  central 
Darwinian  luminary.  The  art  of  education  is  beginning 
to  feel  the  progressive  influence  of  the  Darwinian  im- 
pulse. In  fact,  there  is  hardly  a  single  original  worker 
in  any  department  of  thought  or  science  who  has  not 
been  more  or  less  profoundly  affected,  whether  he 
knows  it  or  whether  he  knows  it  not,  by  the  vast 
si3reading  and  circling  wave  of  the  Darwinian  concep- 
tions. All  our  ideas  have  been  revolutionised  and 
evolutionised.  The  new  notions  are  abroad  in  the 
world,  quickening  with  their  fresh  and  vigorous  germinal 
power  the  dry  bones  of  all  the  sciences,  all  the  arts,  and 
all  the  philosophies. 

And  evolutionism  is  gradually  though  slowly  filter- 
ing downward.  It  is  permeating  the  daily  press  of  the 
nations,  and  gaining  for  its  vocabulary  a  recognised 
place  in.  the  phraseology  of  the  unlearned  vulgar.  Such 
expressions  as  '■  natural  selection,'  '  survival  of  the 
fittest,'  *  struggle  for  existence,'  '  adaptation  to  the 
environment,'  and  all  the  rest  of  it,  are  becoming  as 
household  words  upon  the  lips  of  thousands  who  only 
know  the  name  of  Darwin  as  a  butt  for  the  petty  empty 
jibes  of  infinitesimal  cheap  witlings.     And  Darwinism 


The  Net  Result  20 i 

will  trickle  clown  still  through  a  thousand  channels,  by 
definite  popularisation,  and  still  more  by  indefinite 
absorption  into  the  common  thought  of  universal 
humanity,  till  it  becomes  part  and  parcel  of  the  general 
inheritance,  bred  in  our  bone  and  burnt  into  our  blood, 
an  heir-loom  of  our  race  to  all  time  and  in  all  countries. 
Great  thoughts  like  his  do  not  readily  die  :  they  expand 
and  grow  in  ten  thousand  bosoms,  till  they  transform  the 
world  at  last  into  their  own  likeness,  and  adapt  it  to 
the  environment  they  have  themselves  created  by  their 
informing  power. 

Happy  above  ordinary  human  happiness,  Charles 
Darwin  lived  himself  to  see  the  prosperous  beginning  of 
this  great  silent  philosophical  revolution.  Harvey's  grand 
discovery,  it  has  been  well  said,  was  scoffed  at  for  nearly 
a  whole  generation.  Newton's  marvellous  law  of  gravi- 
tation was  coldly  received  even  by  the  gigantic  intellect 
of  Leibnitz  himself.  Francis  Bacon,  in  disgrace  and 
humiliation,  could  only  commend  his  name  and  memory 
*  to  foreign  nations  and  to  the  next  age.'  It  is  too  often 
so  with  thinkers  of  the  first  and  highest  order :  it  was 
not  so,  happily,  with  the  gentle  soul  of  Charles  Danvin. 
Alone  among  the  prophets  and  teachers  of  triumphant 
creeds,  he  saw  with  his  own  eyes  the  adoption  of  the 
faith  he  had  been  the  first  to  promulgate  in  all  its  fulness 
by  every  fresh  and  powerful  mind  of  the  younger  race 
that  grew  up  around  him.  The  Nestor  of  evolutionism, 
he  had  lived  among  two  successive  generations  of 
thinkers,  and  over  the  third  he  ruled  as  king.  With 
that  crowning  joy  of  a  great,  a  noble,  and  a  happy  life, 
let  us  leave  him  here  alone  in  his  glory. 


INDEX. 


AOASSIZ 
AOASSIZ,  17,  33 
Anticipations  of  natural  selec- 
tion, 81 
'  Antiquity  of  Man,'  120 
Astronomy,  15 


Baden- Powell,  78 

Bahia,  43 

Bates,  18 ;   in  Brazil,  79  ;  on 

mimiciy,  117 
•  Beagle,'   voyage  of  the,   38 ; 

Zoology  of,  69 
Bell,  Sir  C,  155 
Boucher  de  Perthes,  120 
Brazil,  43 

British  Association,  118 
BufEon,  7 


Chambees,  Robert,  18;  his 
'  Vestiges  of  Creation,'  70 

Colenso  on  the  Pentateuch,  121 

'  Coral  Reefs,'  68 

Cuvier,  12  ;  as  a  geologist,  13 ; 
system  of  animals,  63 


DARWIN 

Darwin,  Charles,  his  ancestry, 
20;  birth,  27;  birthplace, 
31  ;  contemporaries,  33 ; 
education,  34  ;  at  Edinburgh 
University,  ii. ;  at  Cam- 
bridge, 35 ;  starts  on  the 
voyage  of  the  •  Beagle,'  38 ; 
returns  to  England,  58  ;  pub- 
lishes his  journal,  59  ;  plans 
'Origin  of  Species,'  60; 
elected  to  Royal  Society,  64 ; 
secretary  to  Geological 
Society,  64 ;  marries,  ib. ; 
publishes  •  Coral  Reefs,'  G8  ; 
geological  observations,  76 ; 
Monograph  on  Barnacles,  fi. ; 
publishes '  Origin  of  Species,' 
86  ;  its  success,  112 ;  second 
edition,  114;  variation  of 
animals  and  plants,  125 ; 
pangenesis,  126  ;  fertilisa- 
tion of  orchids,  127;  'Descent 
of  ilan,'  132;  later  works, 
155  ;  last  illness  and  death, 
173;  character,  174;  place 
in  evolutionary  movement. 


204 


Charles  Darwin 


DAKWIN 

177;  outcome  of  his  work, 

193 
Darwin,  Erasmus,  10 ;  his  life, 

20  ;  appearance,  21 ;  poems, 

ih.;  'Zoonomia,  21 ;  *  Temple 

of  Nature,'  25 ;  his  marriages, 

25  ;  on  descent  of  man,  133  ; 

on  sexual  selection,  146 
Darwin,  Erasmus,  the  younger, 

34 
Darwin,  Kobert,  20 
Darwin,  Robert  Waring,  25, 2C; 

his  home,  31 
De  Candolle,  63 
Down  House,  Darwin   settles 

at,  65 
Du  Chaillu,  134 


Earthworms,  66, 168 
Edgeworth,  25 

Evolution,  general  theory  of, 
177 


LYELIi 

Haeckel,  letter  to,  67; 
'History  of  Creation,'  124; 
on  sexual  selection,  151 

Henslow,  Prof.,  35;  recom- 
mends Darwin  to  Capt. 
Fitzroy,  38 ;  at  Oxford,  118 

Herbert,  Dean,  1 8 

Herschel,  Sir  Wm.,  15 

Holland,  Sir  Henry,  27 

Hooker,  Sir  Joseph,  74;  on 
catasetum,  78 ;  accepts 
Darwinism,  117;  publishes 
his  •  Flora  of  Australia,'  ib. 

Horner,  Leonard,  17 

Humboldt,  33 

Huxley,  Prof.,  lecture  at  Royal 
Institution,  117;  'Man's 
Place  in  Nature,*  122;  on 
coming  of  age  of  •  Origin  of 
Species,'  166 


JUSSXBU,  63 


FiLHOL,  168 

Fiske,  Prof.,    58 ;    on  natural 

selection,  130 
Fitzroy,  Captain,  33 
Fuegians,  51 


Galapagos  Islands,  52 

Galton,  Francis,  27 

Gaudxy,  168 

Geology,  rise  of,  13  ;  evolution- 
ary aspect  of,  180 

Goethe,  9,  12 ;  on  animal  ori- 
gin of  man,  133 

Gorilla,  134 

Gray,  Asa,  78,  124 


Kant,  nebular  hj'pothesis,  15 
Knight's  law,  159 
Kolreuter,  159 


Lamarck,  10;  Darwin's  read- 
ing of,  47;  on  descent  of 
man,  133 

Laplace,  nebular  hypothesis,  16 

Lecoq, 18 

Linmeus,  6  ;  his  artificial 
system,  63 

Lyell,  14,  64  ;  '  Principles  of 
Geology,'  69 ;  extract  from 
letters,  78;  anticipations  of 


Index 


205 


MALTHU8 
natural  selection,  99 ;  slow 
acceptance     of   Darwinism, 
119 ;  •  Antiquity  of  Man,'  120 


VON  BUCH 
Powell,  Baden-,  78 
« Physiological  Units,'  126 
Psychology,  evolution  in,  183 


Malthus,  15 ;  influence  on 
Darwin,  50,  67,  74,  94 

Matthew,  Patiick,  18 ;  ex- 
tracts f  I'om,  82 

Mimicry,  79 

Monte  Video,  Darwin  at,  46 

Mould,  formation  of,  C6 

Mount,  the,  31 

Muller,  Fritz,  124 

MuUer,  Hermann,  124 

Murchison,  14 


•NATUBALiSTon  the  Amazons,* 

79 
'  Naturalist's  Voyage  round  the 

World '  published,  59 
Natural  system,  63 
Nebular  hypothesis,  15,  179 
New  Zealand,  Darwin  at,  54 


Oken,  17 

'Origin      of      Species,'      first 

planned,   60 ;  projected,  78  ; 

published,   86 ;  analysis  of, 

89;  its  success,  112  ;  second 

edition,  114 
Owen,    Sir    R.,    33,    69;    on 

types,  78 


IlAFINESQlTE,  69 

Eio  Janeiro,  Darwin  at,  43 

St.  Hilaibb,  Geoffroj',  9 ;  the 

younger,  77 

St.  Paul's  Rocks,  43 

Sexual  selection,  first  glimpse 
of,  45;  Darwin's  theory  of, 
144 

Smith,  William,  13 

Sociology,  183 

Spencer,  Herbert,  17 ;  on 
'  Vestiges  of  Creation,'  72 ; 
essay  in  the  '  Leader,'  77  ; 
'  Principles  of  Psychology,' 
ib. ;  essay  in  '  Westminster 
Review,'  84 ;  extracts  from 
'Leader '  essay,  88  ;  accepts 
Darwin's  theory,  118 ;  '  Prin- 
ciples of  Biology,'  ib. ;  •  Phy- 
siological Units,'  126 ;  theory 
of  evolution,  191 

Sprengel,  103,  158 


Thompson,  Allen,  163 
Treviranus,  17 
Tucutuco,  47 
Tyndall,  Prof.,  163 


Pangenesis,  126 
•  Philosophie  Zoologique,'  12 
Population,  Malthus 's  essay  on, 
16,51 


♦Vestiges  of    Creation,'  18; 

criticism  of,  70 
Von  Baer,  18 
Von  Buch,  18 


206 


Charles  Darwin 


WALLACE 

Wallace,  Alfred  Eussel,  18; 
goes  to  Brazil,  79  ;  publishes 
his  travels,    80;    in    Malay 
archipelago,    ib.  ;    discovers 
natural  selection,  ih. ;  paper 
at  Linnean  Society,  81 ;  on 
sexual  selection,  153 
Wedgwood,  Emma,  65 
Wedgwood,  Hensleigh,  27 
Wedgwood,  Josiah,  27,  28 
Wedgwood,  Susannah,  27 


ZOONOMIA 
Wells,  Dr.,  anticipates  natural 

selection,  81 
White,  Gilbert,  on  worms,  169 
Wollaston,  18 
Worms,  action  of,  66,  168 
.Wright,  Chauncey,  124 


•  ZooNOMiA,'     Erasmus     Dar- 
win's, 22 


CMrles  Darwin's  Worts. 


Origin  of  Species  by  Means  of  Natural  Selection,  ot  the 
Preservation  of  Favored  Races  in  the  Struggle  fox 
Lifc>  Kew  aad  revised  editioii,  v.ith  Additions.  12mo.  Cloth, 
$2.00. 

Descent  of  Man,  and  Selection  in  Relation  to  Sex.  Witb 
many  Illustrations.     A  new  edition.     12ino.     Cloth,  $3.00. 

Journal  of  Researches  into  the  Natural  History  and  Geol 
osY  of  the  Countries  visited  during  the  Voyage  of  H. 
M.  S.    Beagle    round    the    World.     A  new  edition.     12ni0. 

Cloth,  $2.00. 

Emotional   Expressions  of  Man  and  the    Lower  Animals. 

12uao.     Cloth,  ^3.50. 

The  Yariations  of  Animals  and  Plants  under  Domestica* 
tion.  With  a  Preface,  by  Professor  Asa  Giur.  2  vuls.  lilu^. 
trated.     Cloth,  $5.00. 

Insectivorous  Plants.     12nio.     Cloth,  $2.00. 

Movements  and  Habits  of  Climbing  Plants.  With  Illustra. 
tious.     12ino.     Cloth,  $1.25. 

The  Various  Contrivances  by  -which  Orchids  are  FertiN 
ized  by  Insects*  Revised  edition,  with  Illustrations.  12mo. 
Cloth,  $1.75. 

The  Effects  of  Cross  and  Self  Fertilization  in  the  Vegeta- 
ble Kingdom.     12mo.     Cloth,  $2.00. 

Different  Forms  of  Flowers  on  Plants  of  the  same  Species. 

With  Illustrations.     12iiio.     Cloth,  $1.50. 

The  Power  of  Movement  in  Plants.  By  Charles  Darwin, 
LL.  D.,  F.  R.  S.,  assisted  by  Francis  Dakwim.  With  Illustrations. 
12mo.     Cloth,  $2.00. 

The  Formation  of  Vegetable  Mould,  through  the  Action 
of  Worms.  With  Observations  on  then-  Habits.  With  Illustra. 
tions.     12mo.     Cloth,  $1.50. 


*br  saie  by  aU  booksellers ;  or  fent  brj  mail,  post-paid,  on  receipt  of  price. 


»«w  York:  D.  APFLETON  &  CO..  1,8.  &  5  Bond  Street. 


ENGLISH  WORTHIES: 


illiUtarB,  Naoal,  Citerors,  Scientific,  Ctgal, 
(Ecclesiastical,  Social,  etc. 

Edited  by  ANDREW  LANG,  M.A. 


Messrs.  D.  APPLETON  k  CO.  are  the  American  publishers  of  a 
new  series  of  small  voliimes  entitled  "  English  Worthies,"  consisting  of 
short  lires  of  Englishmen  of  influence  and  distinction,  past  and  present, 
military,  naval,  literary,  scientific,  legal,  ecclesiastical,  social,  etc.  Each 
biography  will  be  intrusted  to  a  writer  specially  acquainted  with  the 
historical  period  in  which  his  hero  lived,  and  in  special  sympathy,  as  it 
were,  with  his  subject. 


DARWIN By  Geant  Allin. 

MARLBOROUGH By  George  Saintsbubt. 

STEELE By  Austin  Dobson. 

SIR  T.  MORE By  J.  Cotter  Morisok. 

WELLINGTON By  R.  Louis  Stevenson. 

LORD  PETERBOROUGH.        .        .        .  By  Walter  Besant. 

CLAVERHOUSE        .        .        .        .        .  By  Mowbray  Morris. 

LATIMER By  Canon  Creighton. 

SHAFTESBURY By  H.  D.  Tbaill. 

GARRICK By  W.  H.  Pollock, 

ADMIRAL  BLAKE By  David  Hannat. 

RALEIGH By  Edmund  Gosse. 

BEN  JONSON By  J.  A  Stmonds. 

IZAAK  WALTON By  Andrew  Lang, 

CANNING By  Frank  H.  Hill. 

In  small  lamo  volumes,  cloth.     Price,  75  cents  per  vol. 
New  York :  D.  APPLETOX  &  CO.,  Publishers,  1,  3,  &  5  Bond  Street. 


Date  Due 


-J 

-1 

1 

1 

1 

1 

■ 

- 

■ 

" 

",                     " 

1 

PRINTED 

IN   U.S.A.                      C 

M.   NO.   24    161               m 

Allen,  Grant. 
Charles  Darvin. 


Allen,  Grant. 
Charles  Darwin, 


A    000  502  861 


QH31 
.D2 

Ali25c 

1885 


Q^31 

.D2 

AU25c 

1885 


tf. 


MEDICAL  SCIENCES  LIBRARY 

UNIVERSITY  OF  CALIFORNIA,  IRVINE 
IRVINE,  CALIFORNIA  92664 


rwnmm  m  v.a.ik 


